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Not As Done As I Thought

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 10/24/2023 at 19:200 Comments

I've reopened this project as ongoing. It never fails that as I'm wrapping up a project I think of what I would have done differently were I doing it again. So in my Final Thoughts for this project so far I said: 

Wiring the Tile Holder Buttons was a pain and represents I think the weak point in the build. This is especially true since repeatedly pressing the buttons is going to put stress on the solder joints inside.  Perhaps some hot glue would help. If I were doing it again I would probably design some small PCBs to hold surface mounted versions of the hall effect sensors.

And sure enough I had a button failure after a couple of days. So the small PCBs for the buttons is a go for sure. While I'm at it I decided to do a PCB for the main part as well. I don't know if anyone will ever want to build a MacroPad With Tile Buttons, but the dead bug wiring would probably scare them off if they did. With a PCB it will be a piece of cake. 

Obviously not to scale relative to each other but these give you an idea where I'm going with this.

Update 2003-10-25

The PCBs are off to fabrication. I have posted the KiCad 7 files and Gerbers to GitHub.

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