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Even More Stabler

A project log for MacroPad With Tile Buttons

As a quick follow-up to my “A Tile Based MacroPad” I present an alternative.

michael-gardiMichael Gardi 10/14/2023 at 23:040 Comments

The Tile Holder Button (THB) I'm using in this project is not my first attempt at making my own switches (slider, rotary, rocker, button).  (Actually the THB is more a case of making an existing switch my own.)

The common thread in all of these designs is that I put a lot of effort into the look and feel of the finished product (oh and magnets ;-). 

So even with the stabilizer added, pressing the tile button still felt a little "mushy", which was a marked improvement over "loose" and "floppy" without the stabilizer. Furthermore the grating sound of the 3D printed THB brushing against the 3D printed rectangular hole in the top of the MacroPad was annoying, exacerbated by the fact that the layer lines go in the same horizontal direction for both.  This also makes pushing the THB feel "rough". 

To mitigate the scraping noise/feel I tried making the rectangular hole a little bigger, but this just gave the button more room to flop around in, and did not completely remove the grating problem. 

In an effort to work around the layer lines on the top panel rectangular holes, I laser cut a piece of 3 mm acrylic to fit into the top panel.

Since the top panel holes were a little too big anyway at this point, I made the acrylic sheet holes smaller, pretty close to the actual tile holder dimensions. This made a big difference. The grating feel/noise when pushing a THB was significantly reduced, but not eliminated unfortunately. Furthermore since the acrylic hole was smaller the mushiness was eliminated. 

On the tile holder side I tried wrapping some clear tape around the part that sticks up through the top panel and the grating noise is gone too. Now I worry about the long term durability of this solution so I am looking at alternatives:

One other thing I noticed while working through these issues was that the THB could be pulled up through the top panel pretty easily, dislodging the stabilizer wire. So I added a "retaining ring" to prevent this and hold them firmly in place with the top panel attached.

With the "feely" issues out of the way, I can now see my way clear to finish the remaining Tile Holder Buttons and wrap things up here.

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