I figure I might as well document this feature now that it may become relevant for people's prototyping. I actually added this feature a month or so ago at Melvang's request. The feature is basically the ability to change the size (and shape) of the square switch cutout. NOTE: This functionality ONLY works on the square cutout shape, the settings will be ignored for all other shape cutouts.
I alluded to this functionality in
this post when talking about building a simple and inexpensive lube station out of plastic.
I think this is relevant to the current conversation because it may work out to be the cheapest way to prototype hand wired cases.
So here is the idea. You have a 1.5mm switch plate laser cut out of acrylic. We all know that 1.5mm acrylic will never hold as the only support for a keyboard plate. So we would have to add a supporting layer underneath the switch layer. I would suggest using something like 3mm acrylic or maybe even something like wood. Of course, in order to add this layer, the openings have to be bigger than the switch plate so the switches will clip into the 1.5mm switch plate.
To illustrate, the switch plate would be 1.5mm and would look like this:
You would then have a support layer with 16mm square holes in, say, 3mm acrylic or wood which would go under the switch layer and would look like:
When you put the switch layer on top of the support layer, it would look like this:
I suspect we can get some relatively inexpensive prototype cases built this way. I would be interested in doing it in 100% acrylic and putting my LEDs on the bottom of the switch in a hand wired setup.
Ok, so how does this feature work already?!? Get to the interesting part...So if you add a background color to your layout and then look at the raw data, you will see this new object at the top of the raw data:
We are going to piggyback off that object and add our config into that object to change the shape of the square. In this case we are going to grow the square by 2mm in both width and height resulting in a 16mm square hole, so we would put the following:
{backcolor:"#505050",grow_x:2,grow_y:2},Now the interesting thing here is that you can grow in both a positive or negative direction. So if you wanted to cut an Alps Only plate and keep it on the cheap, you could do the following:
{backcolor:"#505050",grow_x:1.6,grow_y:-1.1},This would result in the following cutout:
I think that is enough for this post. If you have more questions or would like to discuss the feature more, fire away...
