• Designed in Onshape Free
• 8 beatmania IIDX clone switches w/ LEDs from AliExpress
• 4 rotary potentiometers and 4 slide potentiometers
• Faceplate laser cut on 1/8" 5052 aluminum by SendCutSend
• Using aluminum wall mount sign holders with rubber pads as legs

• Based around a Teensy 3.2 because I had one
• Connected via PCB and 18 gauge copper jewelry wire
• Switches wired inline with LEDs to light up when pressed
• PCB designed in KiCad
• PCB manufactured by Oshpark
• NGE artwork desgined in Inkscape
• Art converted to footprints with svg2mod
• Special thanks to Uri Shaked's Practical Guide to Designing PCB Art

• Running Arduino
• Using USB MIDI

Everything fit in the plate beautifully. The faceplate only needed a little bit of post-processing with a file and some scotch brite.

The rotary potentiometer pins were longer than expected. I extended each slide potentiometer pin with the metal innard of a female pin header so that the PCB will sit parallel to the faceplate.

The aluminum legs strip easily.

The PCBs look great. There's a few spots where the silkscreen wasn't printed. I knew the fab house would remove silkscreen on top of exposed copper, but it looks like they also remove silkscreen within a small radius around exposed copper. Also, some small lines on the left were left out of my Gerbers; I'm not sure how that happened.

The copper wiring was a pain. Removing the coating from the jewelry wire and trying to keep everything straight and sized correctly was tedious.

The easiest method I found to remove the coating was scraping with a razor blade. Fun-Tak was useful for securing things while soldering.

I could've benefitted from better modeling of the wiring ahead of time, and I should've used through-hole pads on the PCB for the wire.

In the future I might try to use thicker wire that holds it shape better. Since I still have a bunch of wire left over, I'll probably find a way to strip a large amount of it ahead of time. I think I'll also buy better solder.

This sketch I found in my notes is pretty much how each switch is wired.

Finally, the linear and rotary potentiometer knobs both needed some work. I bought rotary pots without knob splines because they seemed nicer (apart from that), so I just drilled out the knobs a big to fit on. The linear pots came with knobs, but I bought nicer ones that were way too tight. I shaved down the linear pot stems a bit with a razor blade and used some Fun-Tak to try and help them sit a bit higher and not scratch against the plate.

Both sets of knobs still rub on the plate a bit, I think 1/8" is probably the upper limit these parts are intended to be mounted through.