The JTAG board of M1 is somewhat difficult to connect to. The "official" solution is to remove the top and then attach a special angled mini-USB cable. All very ingenious but hardly convenient, at least not if you're a developer who uses the JTAG board pretty much all the time.
A straight cable that could be inserted through a hole in the rear wall would be much more convenient. The problem: you'd have to cut the hole into that pretty acrylic case. Better to make a full replacement for the wall, and leave the original case part intact. Since I haven't used acrylic yet, I thought of a simpler material: cardboard. While this has a somewhat third worldish flair, it's easy to source - straight from the pile of discarded packaging material - and easy to machine. I use Joachim's original M1 case design [1], converted it to gnuplot [2], and then made a parametrized equivalent of the front and rear walls with fped [3]. The conversion to gnuplot wasn't strictly necessary. I could have used QCad to get the measurements. [1] http://projects.qi-hardware.com/index.php/p/m1/source/tree/master/cad/protocase_v7_laser.dxf [2] http://projects.qi-hardware.com/index.php/p/cae-tools/source/tree/master/dxf2x/dxf2gp [3] http://projects.qi-hardware.com/index.php/p/wernermisc/source/tree/master/m1/case/ I then added the hole for the USB cable to the rear wall and moved the holes for the USB ports on the front wall a little. The latter is a special feature of just the M1pre-rc4 prototypes, where the USB ports were reworked and the receptacles had to be raised for this: http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/File:M1pre-rc4-u-A022.JPG This is what the rear wall looks like now: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/m1/tmp/m1-cartonero.jpg The cardboard looks a little more crumpled than necessary. That's because the adhesive tape I used to hold the cardboard on my mill was very reluctant to let it go again. Also the hole for the DC connector ended up being a bit too tight, which is why the wall bulges outward there. So it's not perfectly, but it'll serve well enough to keep foreign object from accidently disturbing the delicate circuitry inside. - Werner _______________________________________________ http://lists.milkymist.org/listinfo.cgi/devel-milkymist.org IRC: #milkymist@Freenode
