TPU 3D-Printed Enclosure Redesign, Agrivanna Livestock Collar (v1.5) Ended

Agrivanna is an early-stage agtech company building a solar-powered GPS virtual fencing collar for beef cattle. We just finished our first on-animal field pilot and the current housing, a rigid 3D-printed PLA enclosure, cracked and broke apart under normal cattle behavior (rubbing, head strikes, one escape incident). We need a freelance mechanical/product designer to redesign the outer housing as a flexible TPU 3D print ahead of a fall field test round.

We cannot change the internal electronics for this round. The collar holds two rigid internal component trays: one larger box holding a 10,000 mAh battery and an actuation board, and one smaller box holding a controller board. Both currently sit inside rigid enclosure boxes connected by a flexible bridge that rests on top of the animal's neck, with a 2 inch wide strap running through the design and a cobra-style buckle for fast on/off in the field.

We built a cardboard mockup (photos and a short video attached) of the design direction we want: a single-piece, one-print TPU housing that the two existing internal boxes slide into and lock in place, shaped like a cradle so gravity and the housing itself hold the electronics in rather than screws alone. The flexible bridge between the two side enclosures needs to conform to the animal's neck and flex under impact instead of cracking. The design needs a way to route the wire connecting the two internal boxes across the bridge (a routing channel, a shrink-wrapped flexible jumper, or an integrated feature in the print, your call), and needs to leave the top of one box open or exposed enough for a solar panel to get sun.

The previous rigid housing's main failure point was the bridge and the box-to-bridge connection. The new design needs to survive being pulled, pushed, stretched, twisted, and struck without cracking or developing weak points, sit as high on top of the neck as possible so impacts land on top rather than the side, and keep the strap and buckle interface unchanged (do not redesign the strap or buckle, just integrate clean pass-throughs for them). This is an interim step ahead of a future injection-molded version, so the deliverable should be optimized for FDM printing in a flexible TPU/rubber-like filament on a standard desktop printer, not for injection molding.

Reference: two 3D box shapes (see attached photos/video), 2 inch strap width, bridge conductive contact points spaced roughly 5 to 7 cm apart for shock delivery. We'll provide rough dimensions and additional reference material directly.

Deliverables: STL files ready to print, plus native CAD or STEP source files. Looking for one to two rounds of revision based on our print-and-fit testing. Please share any prior TPU or flexible-material enclosure work in your proposal, ideally something wearable or impact-exposed. read less