CADing up a design is a long laborious process which can ultimately drive a sane person mad, but with the right amount of prep work it can be sped up and provide great data which can be used to render visuals, export CNC machine files, and confirm that your design intentions can actually be realised in the package you've designed. Having worked out a few of the basic details on paper as to how the internals are going to be laid out, beginning the CAD file was fairly quick.
To begin with I created the outer aluminium profile, which helps define the thickness and the edges of the design. Then I began working on the unibody style component which will fit everything together. The top and bottom edges of this component are exposed when the body is opened up, revealing SD and battery ports.
As you can see above, a flat slot has been created to allow the micro SD card to slide into the body, so it's contacts alight on a break out board just underneath. Below you can see how the break out board is ribbon cabled into the main circuit.
The battery is housed within an injection moulded tube which fits down into the unibody. When inserted, the end of the battery touches contacts located on the back side of the break out board. This means the break out board provides both power and storage channels to the main circuitry.
To ensure there is enough room for all the electronic circuitry needed to power the camera, the main circuit board had to be extended to fill as much of the camera body as possible. This meant locating it at the bottom of the body, with 3mm offset from the bottom face of the unibody to allow for IC thickness's. With assembly intended to be top-down, with all components snap fitting into the unibody, the battery housing had to be made separate. It is inserted into the body as shown below via an interference fit, the same at the break out board.
