For my design of the HAL 9000 enclosure, I mainly used Adafruit’s HAL 9000 replica guide as a baseline.  However, I decided to 3D print most of the pieces since I don’t have access to a laser cutter or any power tools.

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The only piece that I ended up buying was the button, so I followed that section of the tutorial closely, but mainly used the linked references for the design of the case.

Because of the 250x150mm limitation of the print bed, I broke up the case into parts.  The two outside sets of pieces are the vertical walls of HAL, the two pieces with center holes are horizontal walls that will have wiring run through them.  The top piece on the center-left side is the top of HAL.  The piece with a grid of holes is the speaker grill.  Lastly are the two black pieces, which form the main plate with a hole for the red “eye.”  Also notice the black rectangle at the top; this will be the space to put the HAL 9000 label.  I left this to save myself time measuring when applying the label.

The next step was gluing all of the pieces together, and HAL starts to take shape!

Because the plate is black, even if I don’t cut the label to the exact size, it won’t be noticeable.

The last step is popping in the painted button, and HAL 9000 is complete!

One additional step I’d like to use in the future is applying the same coating, sanding, and painting steps I used for the sword on HAL, to make the replica look more metallic and accurate.  This would not only help cover up the seams between parts but would also help me replicate the brushed aluminum look on the original HAL’s black face plate.