Try using a cheap slide in housing and pot the assembly with the wires hanging out the top. Dirt cheap process, but hard to rework once the potting sets up. Potting with the right material also makes it very difficult to reverse engineer the PCB. ARIC PARR Sr. Manufacturing Engineer Eaton Corp 1400 S. Livernois P. O. Box 5020 Rochester Hills, Mi 48308-5020 [log in to unmask] 248 608 7780 Fax: 248 656 2242 ------------- Original Text From: C=US/A=INTERNET/DDA=ID/TechNet(a)IPC.ORG, on 2/3/99 2:39 PM: To: Aric Parr@01635@Lectron_RH, EatonWHQ@CorpMail@WHQCleveOH[C=US/A=INTERNET/DDA=ID/TechNet(a)IPC.ORG] Happy day after groundhog day all you techies! Ol' Phil didn't see his shadow yesterday, so that means an early spring (yippie!) But I didn't come to just talk about the weather and some groundhog looking for his shadow, I wanna talk dongles...more explicitly, the enclosing of the little buggers. We're building 5 different boards for this cable TV/WEB TV sorta' system for a customer, and they have this teeny board ('bout an inch square) that they call a gameport adapter, that's really a dongle or software protect key. Right now, we're just kinda' doing a "Rube Goldberg" with these things...there really wasn't a whole lot of thought put into the design and our customer readily admits it. But the good news is they're going to roll the fab and the rest of the assembly so that it makes more sense. Currently, we're building the board (it's double-sided SMT, and you don't even wanna know about the panel I had to deal with), then hand solder an AMP female DB15 connector (that's really made for cables) to the board like a straddle- mount connector. Just so happens that the arrangement of the solder cups for the cable are spaced right around the same thickness as a standard .062" PCB. Once that's done, it gets a 6' length of phone cord soldered to it with a RJ-11 jack crimped at the other end, and then we put the business end of this mess into a AMP clamshell type of enclosure which is screwed shut...looks pretty "Radio Shack'ish", not to mention a lot of hand work. What I'm trying to find out, but don't know where to begin to look, is there someplace that can take either the assembled PCB with the phone cord soldered to it, or just the assembled PCB itself, and mold an enclosure around it? There's all kinds of issues right now with this little guy, his wires break all the time, if the connector isn't precisely postioned when you solder it, it won't fit inside the clamshell...an' it ain't no small task to reposition that connector when the board is so small and you have leads (solder cups) soldered on both sides of the board. We figured that if we could get something like that done it would take care of the wire breaking issue, and it would make it a little easier for us to build, the connector postioning could take a little slop and not need to be reworked as much as we have to now. Anyways, if there's someone that does that kinda' stuff I sure would appreciate knowing how to get in touch with them. Volumes are not a lot right now, but they're putting one of their first systems in at a cable company in the midwest. They're expecting things to take off once that first system is in..so there is some good business potential there. Again, thanks in advance!! -Steve Gregory- P.S. About my little laptop with the gold plated board saga, I opened her up the other day after fixing the power supply problem to find out why my PCMCIA slot wasn't recognizing my card, and it was a solder problem like I thought. But not with the receptical connector, with one of QFP's. There were two pins on one corner that had lifted the joints from the pads just like the power supply connector, had the fillets attached to the feet. I guess I hafta' be pretty careful with it from now on and not jar it too much, or I'll be in it every week reworking something... -Steve Gregory- ################################################################ TechNet E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TechNet <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TechNet ################################################################ Please visit IPC's web site (http://www.ipc.org) "On-Line Services" section for additional information. For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################ ################################################################ TechNet E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TechNet <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TechNet ################################################################ Please visit IPC's web site (http://www.ipc.org) "On-Line Services" section for additional information. For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################