Experimental LFO, front panel teasers

Just for you <3

The SC/OFF is the better-lined-up of the two panels I have had made:


(Apparently, in this first trial version, I located the pot holes (heh) a little too high.)

I imagine painting the etched wording with a dark ink or paint would be easy, if needed.  Personally, the anxiety increase from looking at my own crammed soldering job makes it a no-go.  The through-hole aesthetic is a cool color splash, though.  

Now, if these panels were a frosted, translucent acrylic, and some colored LEDs were placed behind the panels... painted-in numbers would be quite visible, AND you get a light show.  Hmm...

If I didn't have vision issues, I would definitely be considering modifying my AEM for just that.

I second that motion; I'd buy a few hundred as soon as they hit the store.  (As long as they aren't priced like the RV09 AEM pots at Mouser, like, what??? It's quite the song and dance to find the exact component at a price I can afford, and I certainly can't afford and won't pay $1+ for a plastic pot that I can bulk purchase from China at 8 cents apiece.  But I digress.)  I think that the issue here is exaggerated, though, as the acrylic panel is twice as thick as the AEM face plates, as well as resting on the case rather than the standoffs.  Fingers crossed for final printing. 

But in addition to the height, there's the issue with fit.  I LOVE the AEM sockets and patch cables; they make a secure, reliable connection every time (likely due to the tapered collar around the base of the pin) and withdraw with minimal friction.  Every "standard" female pin header I've tried is too tight on the larger-than-breadboard-cable pin shafts, and the electrical contact surface begins too far down into the socket to reliably contact.  Shoving those shiny plated pins with force into those cheap sockets, and heaving them out like I'm trying to become the King of Britain makes me grimace every time. 

   

Sweet! Once you’re done, it would be awesome if you built a few experimental LFO modules and offered them for sale  

I'd really enjoy that!  I never imagined that there would be any demand for a homemade module... But:

Once these components are available, and I can make a clean, functional, "truly compatible" module (pin headers being the main culprit) that I'm proud to sell, I will definitely do this.  That is, if Robert doesn't mind the "reselling" of those components in assembled form... Not sure of any legal supplier/reselling issues regarding this, but all in due time, I suppose.  

And Robert, thank you so much for doing this!  

Amazing, Robert! I can't wait..

I hacked out some rough draft front panels out of the ~1.2 mm thick chipboard.  A sharp hobby/razor/X-acto knife (what's the international name?) cuts through this stuff in a few strokes.  

I reckon they'll get a base coat of paint and some lettering; a dozen or so model paints are at my disposal, but I don't have a plan for decoration or anything outside of the simple, practical AEM aesthetic. 


  

That's the SC/OFF, which I only realized today that I can make a dual module with the addition of a mere two pots. 

As one would expect from a composite paper material, my 1/4" (close to 7mm; my drill index is, sadly, inch fractional) spade bit prefers to rip rather than cut through the chipboard.  A backing surface prevents this on the back side.  If one could accurately drill through a three-layer sandwich of this stuff, the middle would cut cleanly.  Not in possession of the clamping, stable and level work surface, and precision drill (my drill chuck has at least 10 thou of runout), I opted to simply clean the holes as best I could with my X-acto knife.  

Oh, sure.  I'm just broke until April.  I've been thinking about building an auto-centering manual punch much like those but I can't access the lathe in the campus labs anymore. 

I think I'd also need to work on my precision in laying out the front panels.  Each is different due to the style of Protoboard I'm using, which is being phased out for larger panels cut down to allow for full hole coverage on the whole board.  Having a standardized location for the input, output, and pot holes will make creating jigs and custom layouts much easier.  Currently, all of those board components shuffle around a bit depending on which section of Protoboard stock I use.  



With paint and a ballpoint pen, they're just the right kind of crappy to love, IMO:



Pros:
-fast and easy to produce
-minimal power tool usage
-protects underlying circuitry
-provides needed usage information to the user

Cons:
-paint flecks off with the scrape of a fingernail
-my thumb is coated in white paint 
-contact with any amount of water makes panel material swell like a dehydrated sponge
-not sturdy enough to survive contact with enemy forces  friends who love to use your modular and smash their gorilla hands into it 
-looks like a 12-year-old's rushed-deadline art project

I think these will do well enough until I get a precision drawing done of the effective portions of these (can't access my Solidworks files for dimensions because... labs are closed) front panels-- I've found that it's a lot easier to tweak an existing thing rather than build it from scratch.    

MDF, as it turns out, cuts like butter and drills just as nice (although my bit wandered through this stuff like a drunk donkey in a field of mud).  It has some tendency to pill up like the chipboard and other paper products, but it cuts much finer and easier with a bladed tool.



I didn't erase the construction lines before this photo.  Also obvious is the wandering placement of those two pot holes; the stuff is so soft to cut through that any non-orthogonal force makes that bit sail slowly across the workpiece.   ~0.5mm deviation with the pilot hole and ~0.5mm with the full bore means that I'm not laser-accurate and need to use a larger (7mm) hole than the (6mm) AEM face plates.  I hope my hand-chiseling via X-acto knife on the square holes is to the viewer's liking.  

Due to the increased thickness, these MDF front panels are even stiffer than the AEM.  

Predrill hole with a small (2mm) drill first to avoid the larger drillbit skating all over.