On today's episode of "why we build prototypes": chassis flex.

In the digital CAD world, all features are exactly as drawn. Their dimensions always perfectly match the specified value. All surfaces mate perfectly. All fasteners are aligned to their holes. All dimensional values are static and never change, regardless of the physical stresses applied on them. Multiple objects are allowed to occupy the same space.

None of these things are true in the real world.

Digitally simulating all the messiness of the real world are hard. There exists software tools for engineers to simulate specific aspects. Interference checking can try to find objects occupying the same space, but it can be deceptive because they rarely take into account all the other factors such as manufacturing tolerance and physical stresses.

Finite element analysis can help understand how objects move in response to physical loads in the real world. It takes some level of expertise to properly set up an analysis, beefy computing resources to run the simulation, and then human expertise again to interpret the results. A badly set up simulation will tell the wrong story, a bad interpretation can do the same, and manufacturing tolerances can throw everything off in unexpected ways.

For a hobbyist project that is quick to build and failure is cheap, it is faster and easier to find out how things act in the real world by just building it in the real world. Hence the construction of Luggable PC Mark II Revision B. Seeing everything in the physical world highlighted some problems. Most of them are trivial, but one stood out.

The Lenovo monitor is attached in the lower back, using a metal plate I pulled from the original display stand. The plate goes to a 3D-printed spacer, which attached to aluminum extrusion bars, which attach to another 3D printed part, before it is attached to the bottom of the aluminum frame. All those less-than-perfect joints add up to a clearly visible problem. The monitor is supposed to sit within the aluminum extrusion frame, but when all the little errors accumulated, the top edge of the monitor does not sit in the frame like it did in CAD, it actually juts out over 20 mm from the frame.

Next: how to help the top of the frame and the top of the monitor stay together.

 

Screen frame separation