thanks again! the buttons are indeed cool (cheers to myself! ;)) as they come close to the feel of a 909 and are rock solid.
here’s a description how I made them:
first of all I have to admit that I got inspired by various topics here on the board, so all credit goes to you guys! as I seriously wanted to have backlit buttons, I followed the idea of glueing plexiglass on them (this came from you pay_c, right?). I ordered these round standard buttons from reichelt, which thorsten usually uses for his projects, but I wasn’t satisfied with their feel and quality, especially when I thought of a live situation. however…I found this topic:
http://www.midibox.org/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=tips;action=display;num=1084776108
…and luckily also found an old spare keyboard with the right buttons (read the topic above to learn what kind of buttons you need). I had many ideas of how to make them backlit, but they all turned out to be too tricky, so I took the simplest way and just glued 3mm thick plexiglass on their top, which you can buy in most DIY stores (home depot or whatever ‘baumarkt’ means in english). after that I took a multi-tool (dremel) and roughly grinded the glass down to the shape of the button. the rest is done with a rasp and sandpaper. sounds a bit tricky, but once you get used to it, it takes only a few minutes to finish a button.
mounting them was a bit complicated though, as they dont fit into a 2.54mm rasterplate. 3 pins did, but the 4th was totally out of the grid. I just bent the 4th one up and attached a short bridge to it…easy.
the other problem was, that they have a round bulge on their bottom, so I had to drill 3mm holes into the rasterplate in order to make them fit.
that’s all =)
I’ll post some pictures of the whole process later.
some more hints:
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as these standard keyboards usually have white and grey buttoncaps, you can use the grey caps to mark special buttons or functions on your sequencer (i.e. I took grey caps for step 1, 5, 9 and 13, etc.).
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you can also use the larger ‘alt’ and ‘ctrl’ buttons. I took them for the ‘play’ and ‘mute’ function. (btw, I mounted the beat indicator LED below the ‘play’ button, so the whole big button flashes if the sequencer runs. looks nice!)
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use bright, transparent LED’s!
bear in mind that these buttons need space! also, there is always a small gap of 2mm between each button if you mount them onto rasterplates. you’ll either have to leave it open or get a professional made frontplate with 2mm ridges to cover the gaps. I’m still curious if it all fits when I get mine from schaeffer :-/
nico
