Tracking Tag - Adafruit Feather M0 / Wing GPS

thingiverse

Using the Adafruit Feather case design and Fusion 360, a custom enclosure was carefully crafted to house a tracking tag powered by a Feather M0 with WiFi and a Wing GPS board from Anafruit, along with a reliable 3.7V 1200 mAh LiPo battery. The width of the case was optimized to match the dimensions of the 1200 mAh battery, which was located in the main housing near the slide switch. Since the battery compartment was too shallow to accommodate the switch, a strategic adjustment was made to increase the main housing height, allowing for seamless stacking of the GPS wing on top of the Feather M0. To ensure flexibility and customization, the Adafruit Fusion 360 design incorporated user parameters that enabled easy adjustments to key dimensions such as width and height. However, during the redesign process, an error occurred when reducing the box's width, causing the slide switch sketch to become improperly linked. As a result, the retention bosses were inadvertently moved outside of the main box, requiring further modifications. One notable issue with the Adafruit design was the opening for the USB port, which proved too small for most cables, resulting in incomplete contact between the USB data pins. After struggling with Fusion 360 to resolve this issue, I decided to take a more hands-on approach and used a knife to carefully enlarge the USB feature after printing the main body. Another problem with the Adafruit design was the excessive lateral tolerance of the attachment features for the top and battery box, which made the final assembly appear poorly designed. Although the snap tolerance is technically settable through user parameters, the fact that the top and battery bottom slid back and forth excessively during assembly highlighted a significant design flaw. While I may revisit this issue in an attempt to improve the overall snap feature tolerances, it remains unresolved in the attached STL files. In retrospect, while using the Adafruit Fusion 360 design was a welcome starting point, the end result was more frustration than satisfaction. Starting from scratch might have been a better approach, but the experience provided valuable insights into the challenges of working with this particular design.