Laser Cut wooden plate experiments.

[gmjhowe]

Well, it seems everyone is going wood crazy today.

This is a small size experiment piece I made for playing around with tolerances for a cherry MX plate from laser cut wood.

woodplate.jpg (541.63 KiB) Viewed 7693 times

[Jmneuv]

Nice looking. How affordable is laser cut wood?

[dirge]

Nice work, could do a numpad?

[TDub]

Very cool. I have been thinking about using laser cutting for the PCB support in my wood cases. Right now I am glueing single pieces to the bottom of the case. But a laser cut plate would be much better.

How much did your experiment cost?

[guilleguillaume]

I love your pictures as much as your CST trackball ones

I have some laser cutted paint racks from Progressive engineering and they're top quality. They offer laser cut service also and they're located in England.

This would be a cool solution for making keyboard cases...I would buy it for sure.

Would be too much to ask what setup do you use to take those pictures? I'm guessing a lightbox there.

[graboy]

Wow! It looks beautiful. How does it sound when bottoming out? I wood would guess it has a lighter, less metalic sound?

[gmjhowe]

Very cool. I have been thinking about using laser cutting for the PCB support in my wood cases. Right now I am glueing single pieces to the bottom of the case. But a laser cut plate would be much better.
How much did your experiment cost?

I have some laser cutted paint racks from Progressive engineering and they're top quality. They offer laser cut service also and they're located in England.
This would be a cool solution for making keyboard cases...I would buy it for sure.

Nice looking. How affordable is laser cut wood?

I have access to a laser cutter via my local hackspace. This means that for me laser cutting is very cheap.
I pay about £6 for an hours use of the laser cutter. Then laserable ply costs about £2 for an A4 sized sheet.
So, for a keyboard, about A4 in width (so a 75%/ 15 unit keyboard) would cost about £12 I reckon. Note thats a cost to me, as my time is free to myself as I am the one running the laser cutter. However its pretty much the cheapest use it yourself service out there.

[gmjhowe]

Nice work, could do a numpad?

Wow! It looks beautiful. How does it sound when bottoming out? I wood would guess it has a lighter, less metalic sound?

Yeah, you could easily do a number pad. The main thing limiting me making a full size case is that I need a PCB, something either 60% or 75% in size.

The main advantage do this method is you can add layers right down to the point that they touch the PCB. As you can see in the pictures I have an extra layer under the normal 'plate' layer that has bigger holes for the switches. This could easily be matched on the underside of the PCB as well. Which means each switch will have a wooden support clean around its perimeter. You can not do that as easily with metal due to it messing with the circuit, or damaging the PCB.

That method will result in a very solid feel, with basically no give or flex when you press down a key.
It sounds fairly light due to the nature of the wood. I did think about making it even lighter and quieter by introducing a layer of cork as one of the lower layers.

[gmjhowe]

I love your pictures as much as your CST trackball ones

Would be too much to ask what setup do you use to take those pictures? I'm guessing a lightbox there.

Not at all, most of it can either be learned yourself just by playing with your equipment, add in some pointers from the internet and you are all set. That is to say, its not like I have any 'trade secrets'.

I actually do photography professionally as part of my job, however I always try and do that within a decent budget as I don't want to waste all the money I bring in.

For these pictures, my set up is actually a lot simpler than you might think. Firstly, I have a DSLR, not quite bottom of the range. About £520 worth. Secondly I have a dedicated flashgun, this is the large flash that you mount on top of the camera in its hotshoe mount, it has to have a rotating adjustable top, with this I went for a 3rd party one made by Nissin, it works just as well as the official canon flash guns, but comes in at a third of the price at £100. Finally, I use a prime lens, in this case a 50mm 1.8 lens. Prime lenses are great for letting more light into the camera, but also for being sharper than a kit lens. However it is not needed, you can still take similar pictures with a kit lens. The flashgun however is pretty much needed for pictures this good.

As for technique, the main thing I use is 'bounce' this basically means I direct the flash at the ceiling, or behind me a little. When the flash is triggered the light 'bounces' off the ceiling and walls, this diffuses the light and gives you lots of evenly spread light onto your subject. Effectively, you turn the entire room into a 'lightbox' you just bounce the flash to diffuse, opposed to shooting through fabric to diffuse. Note, you do need light/pale coloured walls for this, let me know if you don't have that and I will talk you through more options. I place the subject on a white background, often from an A2 pad I have, but in this case was just my white glass desk.

You can also get more of the object in focus by using a smaller aperture, normally you want large aperture to let as much light in as possible, but this gives you a shorter depth of field, because we are using a flash gun it can pump out plenty of light that we can set the aperture to something smaller like f8 or f9.

Let me know if any of that doesn't make sense, especially the stuff about aperture. You can always grab me on IRC to talk about it more.

Also, I might do a better tutorial on taking pictures of keys/keyboards etc, if people want.

[matt3o]

very nice overall, you could even build a keyboard without PCB.

this is more or less what we could do with the custom compact design (but with aluminum of course). It's not that bad actually, if the CNC milling turns out to be too expensive we could try with the sandwich technique.

[dirge]

Yeah, you could easily do a number pad. The main thing limiting me making a full size case is that I need a PCB, something either 60% or 75% in size.

Komar's PCB for the GH60 is available on his site I think? https://github.com/komar007

[TDub]

This could easily be matched on the underside of the PCB as well. Which means each switch will have a wooden support clean around its perimeter. You can not do that as easily with metal due to it messing with the circuit, or damaging the PCB.

This is basically what I would like to do for my wooden cases. The rest of the case would still be none laser cut, but having a solid base for the pcb is really key to making the cases feel great.

[gmjhowe]

This is basically what I would like to do for my wooden cases. The rest of the case would still be none laser cut, but having a solid base for the pcb is really key to making the cases feel great.

Where abouts are you based TDub? If not to far away I might be able to help you out.

Yeah, you could easily do a number pad. The main thing limiting me making a full size case is that I need a PCB, something either 60% or 75% in size.

Komar's PCB for the GH60 is available on his site I think? https://github.com/komar007

Yeah, I downloaded the files, but its seems the version of KiCad for Mac is a slightly older version and it throws up errors.

[TDub]

I am based in Darmstadt, Germany. I have been meaning to create the necessary files and send them out to some laser cutting places near me, but haven't found the time yet. Thanks for the offer but I am not sure it would be much cheaper to send them from the UK then getting them cut locally.

[gmjhowe]

Have you visited the Hackerspace over in Darmstadt? They might have access to a laser cutter and more.

http://chaos-darmstadt.de

[bearcat]

So, um, call me crazy, but what were the results of the tolerances of laser-cut wood for cherry switches? That'd be pretty useful to know!

[philpirj]

Interesting plywood keyboard here: http://robbietilton.com/blog/?p=1318. Particularly interesting how it can be bent.

[jeff]

Great link, thanks

This plywood is very thin, it's OK to position keys but not enough to fix cherry switch. I'm not sure but 5mm seems to be a low limit to avoid flew on a full size keyboard.

[philpirj]

This plywood is very thin, it's OK to position keys but not enough to fix cherry switch. I'm not sure but 5mm seems to be a low limit to avoid flew on a full size keyboard.

It's thin but strong. 1/16", 1.5mm plywood is often used in aircraft/marine, so it should be top notch quality, and it should be water resistant. There are some simpler options though http://www.revell.com/wood/index.html
I'm thinking of layered case made of 1.5mm plywood a-la lister's case for ergodox.

[Findecanor]

It's thin but strong. 1/16", 1.5mm plywood is often used in aircraft/marine, so it should be top notch quality, and it should be water resistant.

I think that boat building with plywood involves a lot of epoxy. In the article, the plywood was soaked in water before it was bent.