Today I have been researching options for permanently marking Mesh Extenders with serial numbers on the housing, cables and PCBs. This is complicated by the tropical-maritime operating environment, and that the housings are to be made of poly-carbonate.
Poly-carbonate can't be safely laser-cut or laser-etched, because it gives off toxic and corrosive chlorine gas.
Tropical-maritime environments eat glue for breakfast, and abound in UV radiation to degrade everything.
So far, the best option I have found is to use a laser-etchable UV laminates, e.g.:
https://www.trotec-materials.com/laser-materials/trolase-metallic-plus/lmt-314-203-br-stainl-steel-black-0-8mm.html
With an appropriate glue.
They do supply them with either 3M 467MP adhesive tape, which claims to be good for polycarbonate, and tolerates high heat etc, or a similar TESA adhesive.
Otherwise, you can get the laminates with no adhesive, and then apply your own, such as Dymax 3025 or 3099, which seem like they should be stronger than the 3M or TESA options.
The laminates themselves are quite cheap, less than AU$20 for 30x60cm. Assuming 4x5cm labels, this gives a material cost of only about AU$0.25 per label (plus glue) -- much less than the cost of the housing. We will likely need one 4x5cm label and two 2x5cm labels, so that we can have safety labels on the insides, incase the one on the outside falls off some how.
For the PCB, we can just have a silk-screen white panel to write the serial number and manufacture date on using a permanent marker, so no great problems there.
For the D-SUB 25-pin cables, we are looking at a nice solution to get those professionally manufactured with a low-pressure over-mould process, for about $14 per cable, plus parts. I need to have a chat to those folks to see what our options are there for imprinting them with serial numbers during production, or failing that, whether we can laser-etch or otherwise mark those.
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