I purchased a FEZ Portal from Mouser and was slightly surprised with the screen placement when it arrived. I created a 3D printed snap fit case from STL files. Unfortunately this did not workout very well, the screen was off center to the left by 3mm and askew (top left to bottom right) by another 2mm. I accounted for some tolerance in screen and mounting hole placement but this feels like a lot and noticeable to the eye.
I can adjust the case but should I have expected this level of tolerance? What are the chances I would be successfully in prying the screen from the board and remounting it with double sided tape?
I noticed the same with the LCD’s mounted to the dev board LCD modules, albeit not as far out as you have here. As they are development modules, I’ve not bothered to re-align them but the Fez portal is a ready made board designed to go into a project housing to it needs to be better aligned than what you have there.
I think GHI need to make a jig that ensures that the LCD is properly aligned as manual placement is not suitable for these.
Yeah, the manual placement is not ideal. I created a new version of the case that allowed for much wider tolerance but the top left to bottom right skew made the usb ports visibly crooked. So I decided to go for it and re-align the screen. It worked pretty well. I used a 3" putty knife (for mudding drywall) and a little heat from a hot air gun. It popped right off without any damage.
I’m really pleased with the end result. The FEZ portal is a great little board.
Nice work and nice UI. What’s the ultimate use for your Fez Portal?
I will be building 2 boards with the same SITcore module used on the Fez Portal and two 4.3" Newhaven displays to build a dual LCD clock connected to MQTT etc.
A simple desktop digital clock and weather station for the home office. It uses a free geo location and web services to retrieve local weather data. This is a personal project I started to play around with the portal UI. Let me get it to a stable state and I will open source both the case and code.
Not sure I will ever get around to it, but creating a custom board where the ports are off the back and powered by usb or power over ethernet (PoE) is my longer term vision.
Nice one. I may steal some of your interface design for my clock. I will have the same size display but I am also considering a change to use the 800x480 version with the same 4.3" frame size because the SITcore has more that enough power to run that resolution. The display is also IPS so viewing angles are very good.
I will be posting up the design later once I have the boards tested and working.
PS. You need to make the opening in your case smaller as you can see the LED on the Fez Portal.
