{"id":780,"date":"2016-08-05T14:08:35","date_gmt":"2016-08-05T13:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/?p=780"},"modified":"2022-07-14T05:51:40","modified_gmt":"2022-07-14T05:51:40","slug":"illuminated-control-panel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/2016\/08\/05\/illuminated-control-panel\/","title":{"rendered":"Illuminated control panel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-776\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/IMG_9190-750x421.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_9190\" width=\"750\" height=\"421\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A friend of mine has had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poseidon.tv\">his recording studio<\/a> fitted out with custom built furniture and wanted a smart control panel to give quick access to some bits and pieces.<\/p>\n<p>I laser cut a piece of smoked acrylic and mounted some sexy (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ebay.co.uk\/itm\/New-LED-Light-Push-Button-Switch-Rectangular-DC-12V-24V-Momentary-Latching-24mm-\/201439923170\">and surprisingly cheap<\/a>) illuminated switches from eBay. The decals on the switches are laser printed onto OHP film, cut out, and fitted inside the keycaps:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-773\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/poseidon_control_panel-2-750x563.jpg\" alt=\"poseidon_control_panel 2\" width=\"750\" height=\"563\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I soldered up the connections on the back of them&#8230; lots of wires. Each switch is illuminated, so it&#8217;s 4 connections per switch, 32 in total. The last thing you want is wires hanging loose, even though this panel will be mounted in a box, but I&#8217;ve seen some neat ways of &#8220;cable lacing&#8221; to tie them all together into a neat loom. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cable_lacing\">Wikipedia has\u00a0some nice pictures<\/a> you can use as a guide; usually waxed cotton is used (I&#8217;m guessing the wax stops the knots from falling apart) but it turns out dental floss works just as well:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-772\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/poseidon_control_panel-1-750x563.jpg\" alt=\"poseidon_control_panel 1\" width=\"750\" height=\"563\" \/><\/p>\n<p>At the bottom of the panel, I&#8217;ve put the studio logo, all nicely backlit. The actual backlight is an old iPod display &#8211; take it apart carefully and you can remove the LCD glass, leaving you with a nice, evenly lit rectangle.<\/p>\n<p>To create the logo, I laser printed several copies of the studio logo onto acetate, then carefully lined them up on top of each other and stuck them together with a little spray mount. Why multiple copies? If you try doing this with a single laser\/acetate, you&#8217;ll find the black parts of the print aren&#8217;t dense enough to block the light properly. Layering up a few copies builds up the contrast, so you don&#8217;t end up with a glowing rectangle with the logo on it. Then I stuck it to the front of the iPod backlight, and glued it to the back of the acrylic panel:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-774\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/poseidon_control_panel-3-563x750.jpg\" alt=\"poseidon_control_panel 3\" width=\"563\" height=\"750\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The buttons are connected to a Teensy LC running in keyboard emulation mode, so they just trigger keypresses on the Mac the panel&#8217;s connected to.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Looks pretty smart in situ (that&#8217;s it just over the keyboard):<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-775\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/IMG_9184-750x421.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_9184\" width=\"750\" height=\"421\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend of mine has had his recording studio fitted out with custom built furniture and wanted a smart control panel to give quick access to some bits and pieces&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-electronics-and-hackery","8":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1609,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions\/1609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}