A Monome Case

by - sampleAndHold.org / Jan Trutzschler

On Tuesday April 15 I came to work in De Waag's Fablab in order to make a case for the monome do it yourself kit, which I bought already a few months ago and had soldered together. The monome is a minimal, yet genius little usb controller, an array of 8 by 8 back-lit buttons. The LEDs behind the buttons can be controlled separately. Through its very open design this interface is open to a lot of possibilities.

I brought with me a 5 mm black plexi glass plate, which I bought in The Hague.

Later it turned out that it is actually 5.5 mm, which made a great difference when designing the box. Alex and I decided that it would be great to design the case in such way that it would click-fit together, without the need to use glue or screws. Alex said that glue might leave ugly looking streams on the surface. Screws aren't really suitable for this kind of material (as I found out later). Although i made some sketches earlier, we sat down on the PC, which is connected to the laser-cutter and started from scratch. On the PC runs Corel Draw, a program that I used a long time ago, when I still had a PC myself. So old memories came up. Must have been at least 10 years ago that I used it, but not so much changed for the simple tasks.

First we constructed the connection directly in the program. Initially I thought of having the connection between the upper part and the sides in the middle, but Alex suggested to put them on the corners. And, yes, on the corners it looks a bit more decent. Thsi was basicaly the reason we started from scratch on that machine. We had to run about 3 versions until the laser cutter delivered us a smoothly, yet firm, fitting model of the connections. Setting the strength and power of the laser was a major issue. The material easily melts, if the laser cuts too slow. In the end we had the 100 1000 0.4 setting. Cutting two times the same relatively fast. The second run we lifted the table on which the plexi glass lies a bit up(~ 2 mm).

The upper surface, where the buttons come through, was the first real cut we did for the final case. I took the drawing for the button holes from a pdf file, which I found on monome's user forum < http://post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=629&Focus=6667 >. That really saved a lot of work. Thanks to the monome open-source community! So basically I had only to include the unique bitten off corners in the drawing. The lasering was just cutting through, could have been a tiny little bit stronger. We had to push a few through.

From the left overs we could have made a memory game or something - nice blocks.

The button array fitted without problems.

While i was preparing a text engraving for one of the sides (sampleAndHold.org), Alex measured and drew the hole for the USB connector. It was getting late, the construction of the connector and finding the right settings for the laser cutter took much more time than I had expected. And then the final cuts were not fully cut through! So we had to cut the sides smooth and sand them by hand. But that actually wasn't that bad, because this way we got the click-fit we were after. Hardly any margin - "spiel". The letter engraving we run only once, the second cut we did without it. And the lettering looks really nice - black on black.

The work in the Fablab was done so far, so we got some fresher air downstairs and a drink.

Back in my studio in The Hague I made some experiments to find the best way to keep the buttons in position, when pressing them. Normally they are screwed on the front-plate. I tried to drill some holes for screws, but in this material it is quite difficult. Especially because the density of the material seems to vary. So I made a temporarily cardboard construction, which I can hopefully laser-cut the next time in the Fablab.

So thanks to De Waag and Alex for helping me to realise this project. And of course to the folks at http://monome.org

A flickr fotostream is also available: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sampleandhold/2424168776/in/photostream/

http://sampleAndHold.org