This is a little hobby effort to design an SLS-printable housing that can fit a DIN-rail mountable power consumption meter on a bare cable, without any rail mount box. At the same time, I wanted to prevent any accidental electric touch-hazard around the device, and protect it from physical shocks and duse. The name "DIN skipper" refers to the fact that, by this snap-on plastic element, you can get rid of the need for a DIN-rail, or a dedicated electric box only to encapulate one simple DIN-compatible element. It could work with various one-unit wide DIN-rail compatible devices, though I specifically designed it for the a popular ORNO brand power consumption meter.
The reason why I designed this, is because standalone socket mountable "watt meters" are huge and occupy more than one sockets usually, are easily loosened, and cost the same as DIN-rail mountable ones, although are less flexible to be re-used later, plus (if mounted in a rented apartment or other public area) are prone to be disconnected and reconnected, ultimately giving the free chance for the users of the monitored device to cheat on the logged amount of power consumption.
So my aim was to design a 3D printable element, which can be printed with a high melting point type of material (an SLS material, e.g. 3201 PA-F Nylon is perfect), and could be easily made in China with JLC or PCBWay.
The victim of the project was a cost-effective but reliable digital consumption meter, called the ORNO OR-WE-521. One important design aspect was to prevent accidental dismantling or break of the assembly, so the housing should snap-on the meter unit, and allow for securing it with zipties or other means of locking on. The are only very small drill-pinpoint holes on its two ends, so you need to personally take care of drilling it with the right sized drill for your needs, as cables vary vastly by diameter. There is deliberately an embedded clearance inside, to allow room for the safety ground-wire and additional cables around, to stay safe below the meter unit when assembled.
The design looks like this, as you can see below. It is very stiff but slightly flexible, giving ample shock resistance to the assembly. Still, its actual disadvantage is that it comes in one single, huge piece, thus costing roughly net 4.59 USD (as of March 2025) per piece - but the reason for this design is that, it should whithstand random drops or collisions with surrounding objects.
Here you can download it:
You can also find an editable model in the repository, which can be modified in Inventor, if you need so.
Author: Gábor Bényei @ BUTE
License: CC BY-NC-SA
The 3D-printable models used here were created with Autodesk Inventor 2024. The models and any derivative work should be used for non-commercial, research/education purposes only.