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Attaching Controls to the Enclosure pt. 1

A project log for Turnado Hardware MIDI Controller

The development of a dedicated hardware MIDI controller for the Turnado audio FX software plugin.

liam-laceyLiam Lacey 09/24/2018 at 09:250 Comments

Over the past weekend I attached the majority of the controls to the enclosure, and the device is now starting to look like a working MIDI controller (from the outside anyway!).

Parts

These are the parts I've used:

Enclosure Choice

I chose to use the Takachi Electric Industrial CF27-18BB enclosure for the following reasons:

Panel Drilling Template

Unfortunately I'm not yet knowledgable in using any CAD software for producing technical drawings, so for creating a template for drilling the enclosure I used a probably-questionable alternative - Photoshop. Whilst using Photoshop probably made this process harder than it needed to be, it got the job done. Also as I'm only using this drawing as a manual drilling template, as opposed to a technical drawing for a CNC routing machine, it doesn't matter too much at the moment. See below for the final template design both with and without gridlines:

Creating the template for the joystick module was the trickiest part here, as the actual joystick isn't central on the PCB meaning the hole for the joystick is not central between the mounting screw holes.

Drilling the Enclosure

To make holes to attach the controls to the enclosure I only had a drill and a Dremel at my disposal - no access to a CNC routing machine (or a CAD drawing to provide to one!).

Below are some photos of the process:

While it's not the neatest drilling job, overall I'm happy with how it came out. I'm not too happy with the messiness of the hole for the LCD (cutting out a rectangular hole with just a drill and Dremel was particularly tricky), however I'm going to attach some kind of laser cut frame to the top of the panel to tidy this up.

Hole sizes for the controls:

Attaching the Controls to the Panel

The controls are attached to the panel in the following ways:

What's Left To Do

I've got a few things left to in regards to attaching controls to the enclosure:

  1. Add a laser cut frame around the LCD to tidy up the messing panel cutting
  2. Attach a USB socket to the rear of enclosure
  3. Possibly replace the knob caps to something smaller

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