When I last left off, I had just started gluing the first draft box together after laser cutting all of the pieces out. Here is the control rotopod sitting in the clamps.

Because we had some trouble printing the keyboards, we couldn't put it all together right away, so we did some test fitting.

Lookin' good!

Eventually, the other half of the keyboard finished printing, and I was able to glue that together. I found some tiny clamps that were perfect for holding it together while the glue dried! No more hairbands and giant bench clamps!

While the glue was drying, we did another test fitting.
Nice! This is really shaping up! That top cross bar is glued in, BTW, which I later decided was a bad idea. In hindsight, I think that perhaps that was supposed to sit on top of the side edges, not between them. I think I had some length problems when I tried to convert the 3d model to a 2d drawing for laser cutting, and I ended up having to sand a lot of parts to fit. Perhaps this was one I should have left alone...

Now, the design had lots of round corners and such, which were originally supposed to be cut on a ShopBot CNC router with 3d control of the cutting head, but since that wasn't available, we did it on the laser cutter. So there were lots of edges that were supposed to have been delivered rounded that were instead square. Since the lab's sander was not yet available, I took the whole thing over to MAG Laboratory in Pomona and used their lovely sander for hours until everything was super round.

Now, the rotopod is supposed to have a touch screen and a huge ton of knobs on it, which necessitates a fancy, shiny face plate. I decided to cut that out of acrylic. MAG Lab's laser cutter came in handy here.

Now, you might notice that the screw mounting holes at the edges are so close that they have merged with the edge. This is because the wood being used is not quite the 1/4" I spec'd, and so the holes have to be in kind of a precise place. Not the best. Also, the holes in the corners don't work so well after you have just sanded off the corners! So I just broke them off... they were kind of pre-broken off, anyway.

So, now I've got most of the pieces, let's do another test fitting!

Wow! That is really starting to look the part! It's so pretty, let's see that again!

Now, in these photos, the keyboard is kinda balanced on some blocks of wood. We can't really get an idea of how it is going to play until we actually mount it so that the keys don't rest on the front of the keybed. So I carefully drilled some holes and used screws to put it together.

Success!

It works! And using the thin plastic strip as a spring works as well as I had hoped! Oh, joyous day!

Next, I need to mount the rotopod to the back of the keyboard. I mentioned to Trent at MAG Lab that I needed a piano hinge, and he just gave me one! It was super long!

I ran into Machinist from 23b Shop while I was at MAG Lab. Since the band saw at MAG Lab was down, he let me go cut it on their machine!

So I took it down to 23b Shop in Fullerton and cut it with their cutoff saw! (Sorry for waking you up Bobby!)

Having a proper sized hinge in hand, I then had to drill some mounting holes.

And screw it together with the handy screws that came with it.
I carefully marked where on the hinge the edge of the keyboard should be so that it will be lined up correctly when I have to flip it over to put the screws in.

Carefully, screw it together, making sure the alignment is still correct.
Attach one of my touch screens to the back of the front panel.
Do a test fitting.
The rotopod even rotates, although the fit is kinda tight...
And here it is with some of the test printed knobs on it.

I still need the pitch and modulation wheel assembly on the left, so I printed that...

Note that there isn't really a good way to get the potentiometers into these. This is just a test print.

It didn't really fit because of the wood that I had added to the keybed to would block it from sitting down correctly. I I took a hackaday saw to it and made it fit!
So here is everything assembled.

So. there it is! The entire prototype case! Now I just have to make the circuits to fill it up!