One of the great things about the internet is that it allows people to understand what other people are doing, even if they wouldn’t normally be very exposed to each other. For example, in some businesses DIN rails are part of everyday life. But for a long time they were not very common in hobby electronics. Although rails are cheap, rail boxes are not always easy or cheap to obtain, but 3D printing offers a solution.
So as the industrial world has been using these convenient rails for decades, we are beginning to see that hobby projects involve them more often and people like [Makers Mashup] discover them and find ways to use them in projects and demonstrates them in this video, also embedded below.
If you have not yet encountered them, DIN rails are a metal strip bent in a certain shape in order to install equipment such as circuit breakers. The typical rail is 35 mm wide and has a cap-like cross section, which leads to the name “upper cap rail”. A 25 mm channel allows you to hide the wiring, and the surface has holes that allow you to mount the rail to a wall or cabinet. They are sometimes called type O or type Ω rails or sections.
There are other profiles. The C-rail is shaped like the letter C and you can guess what the G-section looks like. The rails are also available in different heights, but 35 mm are extremely common. However, there are 15 mm rails and 75 mm rails.
The devices are attached to the “edge” of the upper hat, while the upper part of the hat is attached to the wall or partition. Sometimes you will hear the width of the bus, expressed in “modules”. The module is 17.5 mm wide, so the three-module device is 52.5 mm wide.
The DIN rail originated in Germany around 1928, with modern versions dating back to the 1950s and in some environments everywhere. DIN, by the way, is an acronym for the German standardization organization Deutsches Institut für Normung, but the rails also meet IEC and EN standards today.
If you want to learn more about DIN rails, we’ve done it he looked at them deeply. Combine them with ready extrusions and 3D printing and you can make a variety of very strong constructions.
Comments are closed.