Now we couldn't very well let 500 hackers mess around with a bunch of open wires, so we needed to make a little enclosure for our control system. The simplest way to do this was to grab an off the shelf project enclosure from Radioshack.

We had to drill a bunch of holes to fit our various components, this proved to be a bigger challenge than we had first anticipated since we inevitably didn't have the right size drill bits. After a bit of procrastination we bit the bullet and drilled 4 holes for the big dome switch, the rotary encoder, rotary switch and the clear button. However... it turns out we didn't expect the plastic to melt while drilling in the way it did, leaving us with holes bigger than they were expected to be.

For the big dome, we found that the clamp nut fell straight through the hole, making it impossible to secure the dome switch properly. So we dived into our parts box looking for something we could use as a washer. Thankfully we found this perfectly sized hard drive disk platter which did the job nicely:

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Next we found that the arcade button fell through the hole at certain angles. This was really annoying as it was almost exactly the right size, but not quite. Thankfully though we'd bought two of these switches so we wound the clamping nut tightly onto the shaft and pushed it through the hole which after a bit of action with the dremel was now a perfect fit. We then used the nut from the second button to clamp it all into place. It seems good and solid now:

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Then it was just a case of putting all the additional wiring in place and fixing the Arduino and protoboards into place and securing the rotary encoder and switch.

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Thankfully this was the last major problem we had and now the case looks great. We still need to buy a knob for that rotary switch, but I think this will do...the HackADay sticker really finishes it off don't you think?

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