GH60 Lasercut PCB support plate for DIY cases

[TDub]

Hi everyone,

I have been working on wooden cases for my pokers on some weekends. The biggest factor in how good it feels to type with the wooden cases is the support for the PCB (at least that's my opinion). So I took some time today and drew on top of a picture of the GH60 PCB with what I would laser cut out of a wood plate in order to make space for the switches and other components.

This is just a rough first draft, but I thought I would share it in case someone else is working on a diy/lasercut case and might find this useful:



The goal is to make it better than this (shouldn't be to hard):



It is still missing an outer frame (I would leave about 0.5-1.0mm over the edge of the PCB to create some space between the key caps and the outer wall of the case). Hopefully the plate as a whole will be stable enough. I am kind of worried about the right hand cluster around the enter. It would also be helpful if someone with a prototype board could look over this and tell me if I left enough space for all components.

Next I also want to make it poker compatible and make/test a prototype with my pokers.

What do you think?

[metalliqaz]

That's really cool but is it really needed?  The original poker plate just uses the regular mounting points and it works okay.  Or, am I missing the point completely?

[TDub]

If by plate you mean the pcb support of the original poker, then I disagree. Tons of people complain about pcb flexing with the original poker (me included). When I created the wooden cases, I noticed that a better pcb support makes the poker feel much better, much more consistent. This is especially true if you don't have a plate for the switches like Beasts poker plate.

The pcb support might not need to go to the extremes like in my post, but I thought if I have it lasercut, I might as well go there

Either way, I want an alternative to gluing individual pieces, bc this means taking measurements for every piece and positioning them very precisely by hand. With the poker there are components very close to the mount points, so these pieces need to be positions very exactly or it will prop up the pcb... lasercutting one piece for the entire support would make my life a lot easier.