I have an odd sized PCB (about 0.8" x 14" x 5" ) that needs to be housed in data centers (rack mount.) It's a fairly expensive device so even though we won't have too many of them we're considering having a custom case designed, and style will matter. We're also therefore thinking aluminum or some other nice material. Further, the device has a PCIe finger. While we don't plan on using it in the near future, we'd eventually like to link up several to communicate with one another over a PCIe bus.
The optimal design would therefore have a case for the cards that left the fingers exposed, but could be mounted as is in a rack, or be placed in a very spacious computer (it's over-sized for PCIe), but also that in the future would allow us to insert the same card into a case with a PCIe bus (magma has a nice kit, but it seems expensive for what it is and it doesn't allow for too many slots.) That plus the low quantity and need for high quality, plus my general inexperience with enclosures has led me here.
So where do I start? What design firms could pull this off? Could laser sintering give us the quality we want?
Best Answer
A few similar questions with good answers:
Regarding laser sintering, the answer is probably yes, but the price might be higher than you want. A good model maker can make stuff that looks indistinguishable from the final product, but for many k$.