Mendel90 LED-lit Enclosure

I know I've searched these forums before for an enclosure, so now that I've built one, I felt it was necessary to show you all how I went about making it. Below is the Thingiverse link to printed files and images of the enclosure.

Enclosure Link

I've always wanted LED strip lighting in some fashion around my printer, but never really came up with any good options that I liked. I recently came across a lot of scrap 80/20 aluminum extrusion and knew exactly what to do with it. I wanted to line the interior corners (4 vertical posts and the 4 upper horizontal posts) with LED strip lighting that had a sticky back. To get decent adhesion, I cut a 45⁰ chamfer along the lengths of these posts using a table saw. The cut chamfers are just as wide as the LED strips. I wired the entire set of strips in a single series, gave its starting strip a simple connector so that I could easily unplug it, and ran the other side of the connector to the 12V power supply of the printer. Now, whenever I plug in my printer, the lights come on at the same time.

I placed a door on the front and the top of the printer for accessibility. If I had extra parts, I would have placed a door on each side as well (especially the Melzi side), but I had limited amount of hinges to work with (thought about 3D-printing some hinges...maybe in the future I'll try that). The front and top doors allow ample access to the 'usual' areas that need attention, so just having those two doors is enough.

This enclosure only fits if the standard reel holder for the Mendel90 is not used. Simply making the enclosure taller would suffice if the standard reel holder is used. See the link for more info and dimensions.

That looks really, really good. Nice touch adding the second top door.

The extrusion and lots of clear acrylic really get maximum effect from the leds. Is it an effect of the room lighting or does that extrusion have a colored finish? In the picture it almost looks pewter-ish.

Probably just me but it's too bad power supplies don't have a 12v stand-by... add a switch inside the door frame so you get light when you open the door even with the printer off. Or a small circuit with a rechargeable (LiPoly?) battery. Hell... Adafruit probably has an exact fit.

Thank you for the compliments. The image quality is just poor due to the low light conditions of my basement. The aluminum extrusion is normal 'aluminum' color, no special pewter-ish tint to it. If I had my pick of any 80/20, I'd get some of their black anodized extrusion...that would look pretty slick.

I agree, it would be nice if there were more options with these 12V power supplies. With my design, if I'm messing with or doing anything to the printer, then likely it'll be powered up, so it'll have the lights on at all times, which is helpful.

Black extrusion would look pretty slick- especially with the black dibond printer frame. I also just noticed that yours has a couple filament rolls snuck in there.

I got curious and went looking for a solution... [www.adafruit.com] - $6.95 rechargable LiPo and charger. Pull 5v from somewhere and you have light for if you're working on it, prepping the bed, tinkering with the electronics or want to still have light when you unplug it from the wall or show it off to someone real quick without powering it up.

Anyway- sorry. It was a thought I had and marked to investigate later for when I build my own enclosure.