Another post for artists working with an Arduino: at some point, you'll need to think about how to protect your circuitry from the elements. This may seem like a trivial bother, but the dust at Burning Man places unusual demands on a project box, and we had trouble finding good examples to work from.
Our case is made out of a plastic Sterilite storage box. The top clips on and doesn't seal as tightly as a box made for food, but we needed a box with nice flat walls, and this was the best we could find. We had read that M3 screws were the right size to mount an Arduino, so we ordered some, planning to screw them into these 10mm plastic spacers to elevate the board. It turned out, however, that the spacers were too loose to bind the screws, and the screws weren't long enough to reach the other side. It was the last day, and we couldn't find longer M3 screws anywhere, so we bought the thinnest machine screws we could find at Home Depot, which were #4. Luckily, these seemed to work just fine. Each screw passes through 1) a nylon washer, 2) the circuit board, 3) a 10mm plastic spacer, 4) a pre-drilled hole in the bottom of the box, and 5) a nut.
For power, we drilled a hole in the side of the box, and screwed in a barrel-style DC power jack. To a get a good electrical connection, it was important to screw the jack down tightly. We kept the batteries outside the main box, so that we wouldn't have to open it in the desert, but we made the mistake of leaving the battery pack out in the open air. With all the dust, it was always a trial to get replacement batteries to make contact. Next time, we'll make sure the batteries get their own box.
Dustproofing the lantern connections proved to be a harder problem. Early in our design process, we discussed wiring with Andrew Stone, who designed our Lightuino 5 microcontroller. Andrew suggested running ethernet cables to the lanterns, and agreed to push forward the design of a converter board he had been thinking about. Each converter has a row of 6 ethernet jacks, but we couldn't think of a good way to dustproof around these. In the end, we decided to mount keystone ethernet couplers on the sides of our box, and run short ethernet cables to these from the converters.
All the extra wires meant extra connections that could fail, and one coupler gave us some trouble during the week. On the other hand, we were able to seal around the keystone faceplates with superglue, so the result was quite dustproof. We added extra screws to the corners of the faceplates to keep them flush against the sides of the box.
In the end, our box survived a week in the desert and kept our circuit boards entirely clean. Here are some pictures of our setup:
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