While the team was testing the design more closely, I started looking for someone who could help us with the enclosure design. I searched online for plastic mould manufacturers. The one I found and went to meet were really very busy. They were running all three shifts with all machines fully loaded. They were in no mood to even listen to my request. There were professional service providers, but their rates were too high for me to afford. One of them referred me to a freelance MCAD designer who worked from home in the

industrial area. He agreed to help me within my budget. We started the design work iteratively, the person was not to good at English of Hindi, he was from another state and did not even know the local language. || Problem 6 ||
I used to sit with him explain the design and the requirement dimensions, he used to say he understood but when he sent the design files, they were either too small for the PCB or too big for the intended wall panel. To minimize these iterations, I gave him one fully assembled PCB along with the Anchor Roma wall panel. This helped him understand the requirements better. He kind of took more than a month to get me something that I could at least get 3D

printed to verify the actual fitment.

Another issue was, he was not too serious about his commitment to the delivery dates. Either someone in his family would have met with an accident or he had to travel to his native for some elections or some other

reasons. Though slow, eventually he really did a good job.
I tried my best to match the mechanical to the already designed PCB but that didn’t seem practical. || Problem 7 ||

So, we finalized the mechanical design and then altered the PCB design without impacting the circuit performance requirement. We had to move some components to a slightly different location to accommodate the locking hooks from the faceplate. Now that the design was finalized, I gave a go ahead for making the plastic mould. To save costs the designer used excess steel from another larger mould.

The designer introduced me to one of his contacts who was into low volume injection moulding. We took the proto mould to him and did some same moulding.
I brought the sample plastic enclosures to our office to assemble and see. The mould needed some minor tuning before we finalized the mould design as well.