A Little Nag and The Front & The Back

By now you will have noticed I’m not inclined to throw anything away.  That includes photos.  I kept a copy of every photo we took whilst in the UK, burning them to DVDs and then storing the disks just in case they were required.  However I’ve had this ‘Little Nag’ in my head for a year cautioning me that data burned to DVD can degrade. 

Yesterday I started the process of copying the content of the 100+ DVDs to a hard drive.  Yes, some of the photos couldn’t be copied as the data has become corrupted.  Obviously now is the time to make copies.

Meanwhile the cheap plastic case purchased from Aliexpress for the yacht electronic navigation system was delivered.  I designed the internal layout of the components and then started on the front and back panels.

The adopted technique was to cover the front and reverse side of each panel with masking tape.  This protects the plastic surface and gives a marking surface

The circular hole were drilled with a timber spade bit and the drill press.

That was the easy part.  I then needed to develop a method for cutting out the rectangles.  The method I adopted was to drill a 1.5mm hole in each of the four corners and an 8mm hole in the middle.   I cut four lines from the centre to each corner hole using the jigsaw with a fine tooth blade .

The next step was to use a steel ruler as a line guide clamping it and the plastic panel to the bench top.

Multiple passes with a razor knife on each side of the panel resulted in a straight and sharp cut.

The front panel only has the Volt/Amp meter, On/Off switch and Fuse

I’ve used Sikaflex to secure the ethernet port into the panel. 

The four circular holes are for two USB ports, power input socket and a plug for the BME280 sensor which will be somewhere on the exterior of the yacht to measure temperature, barometric pressure and humidity.