Visit Cards plastic boxes	Thumbnails
Visit Cards plastic boxes can be suitable to a big range of simple electronic projects. As you can see in the pictures, I used this idea to encapsulate one of my earliest projects, a simple kitchen timer with a buzzer. Notes: Drilling in such material is not a good idea, you would probably damage the box, instead, carefully use your soldering iron to make any hole you want.

Old PCs...	Thumbnails
One single old PC can provide you with housing solutions for many of your electronics projects. My personal favorite is the CD-ROM drive, which once emptied, you get a box for a decent project, at the end, the metal box can be painted in black as you can notice in the pictures. My second favorite in this category is the power supply, which is big enough to hold big projects, and is already equipped with AC power input jacks. According to the size of your project, the floppy disk driver may be more suitable. I used it to encapsulate the digital tachometer project, but I don't recommend it because the metallic box is more like a complex frame structure due to the complicated mechanical nature of floppy drives (it is not a consistent box like power supplies and CD-ROM drives). Notes: Those boxes can be painted with any spray paint

Old ball mices and parallel cables	Thumbnails
Still in the category of old computer, there are those famous ball mices that were replaced by the optical mices. I was lucky enough to buy dozens of those for nearly $2 (but that's the kind of deals you can easily find in egypt!). The mouse can be used to host your project, especially after removing all non necessary plastic supports for the -non useful anymore- ball and circuit. What I like in this idea, is that it all comes ready with the fixation screws and an opening for the data cable (which may become the power cable when you use it...) Similarly, but more professional, parallel cables can be used to host your project. But you need some PCB designing and manufacturing skills to produce devices small enough to fit in this tiny place. The ISP programmer on this site uses this technique.

Old multimeters	Thumbnails
Over all the ideas proposed on this page, this is probably my favorite. Cheap multimeters usually don't last long, but that doesn't mean they are out of the picture... you can simply recycle them! Usually, the difficult part of this solution is to produce a PCB that will fit exactly in the same place as the one that was removed, but it's doable. By looking at the pictures you can see the housing of the frequency meter project which was originally an old broken multimeter...

Make your own box	Thumbnails
Making your own box for one of your projects is not an impossible task. As you can see in the pictures, I made the shell of a small robot car with MDF compressed wood (3mm thick and very cheap). You can build the shape you want for your projects from this material, or even better, you can use fiberglass, which is neater but more expansive... Notes: Drilling MDF (medium density fibers) is accepted, gluing is also accepted. The major enemy of this material is water. If in contact with water for a long period of time, the layer of the MDF will gradually deteriorate. In case you want this for outdoor use, i suggest you consider using fiberglass.

Raw CD towers	Thumbnails
I saw this clever idea somewhere on the net a long time ago. Although i never used it, I am sure it's a brilliant idea that can give interesting results. By looking at the pictures you can imagine many ways to integrate your projects into one of those boxes.. Notes: Take lot of precautions while drilling. Usually, for this kind of material, a soldering iron can do a better job than a drill.

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