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Designed a 1st draft of a Case

A project log for Stylish!

A most stylish wearable music synthesizer! A real stylus based monophonic music synthesizer built into a giant trucker belt buckle!

t-b-trzepaczT. B. Trzepacz 10/06/2018 at 13:390 Comments


For various reasons, instead of recording the video today like I was supposed to, I fixed all of the 3d models that KiCAD needed to render the PCB, and then build a 1st draft model of a case around them.

Originally, I was just gonna prep the board models that were already in fine shape to send to a friend who was going to work on the case.

KiCAD can save two types of 3d model:

I worked hard to locate STEP files for all of the missing models, and then take renders of the board out of KiCAD with no models on them so that I could reattach it by hand to the STEP file in Fusion, which will not load textures on anything it didn't make, no way, no how!

I could swear I changed some of those parts 3 or 4 times before I got the STEP files to stick. Was I hitting "Cancel" accidentally?

In the process of doing this, I finally decided to make some holes in the board for mounting the battery holders, which meant shifting some traces around. 

And the speaker mounting ring I did the other day? Thrown out and redone.

This case does actually have to accommodate the current PCB, which means leaving lots of extra space for daughterboards to stick out, which is why this case has some unsightly tubes sticking out of the front. That will go away when everything is SMD components.

This is probably a bunch of wasted effort because I'm gonna have to redo a bunch of this stuff. But I wanted a case for shooting the video. Which will probably take over 24 hours to print, which suggests that it will probably fail in the middle of the print job, while I'm sleeping, and burn the house down.

But hey, here is a fancy purple case on "Stylish!", floating in front of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg.

As far as the design goes, it's getting there. I figure a belt buckle has to be kinda round so it does't poke you and hurt when you wear it. 

I was going for a "Dr. Teeth" style smile for the keybed, and the speaker is supposed to be like a giant cyclops eye (although I don't think the real speaker will be white like this one.)

The row of "button" pads on the left was more for function than for looks, and the giant tubes sticking out on the right were mostly design shortcuts to get the thing done in a way that works with the daughterboards of the prototype hardware... they will go away in the final.

Honestly, while the PCB has been an honest try, the plastic is just the quickest placeholder design I could do that didn't look awful. 

I was proud of how I managed to round the back without having to create infinite planes and draw loft curves. I made an extrusion with a bit of a draft angle, put a huge filet on it, and then told fusion to hollow it out. I then cut open the hollow with another extrude. The front was done in several layers, with a bit of chopping off after. Unfortunately, it didn't like combining the layers, and so it wouldn't let me filet across the place where they join, but I did what I could. 

Here it is laid out for printing in Cura. I had to really fight it to make it let me put the speaker ring in the middle of the hole for the LED ring so that I could print it all at once.

And what of my PCB models that are nicer than they really have any right to be? Here they are!

I'm probably the only one in the world who has bothered to reverse engineer and produce a complete 3d model of that crappy little amplifier board from AliExpress. I'm not OCD at all!

really wanted to make a model for the STM32 "blue pill" board, but I'm so very OCD that I didn't do it because if I did, I'd actually have to actually accurately reproduce the whole board in KiCAD, and that could take weeks. So even though I could have slapped a texture on a rectangle of the appropriate shape and called it done, I didn't do that. I just put a standard 40 pin DIP on there. I don't know whether that is an accomplishment in fighting back OCD, or being lazy.

Anyway, the thing is in the 3d printer, printing. It's been at it for about 45 minutes, and is only 4.3% done, so I don't expect anything for at least 17 hours...

But maybe I'll make a video soon! 

After I sleep. 

Instead of going to the halloween party at Mountie Makerspace. Meh. 

I hate deadlines.

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