DIY Numpad: Enclosure

The numpad plate and PCB didn't fit into the test case I had cut out mainly because the encoder (which sticks off of the PCB a little bit) didn't fit into the slot I originally designed into the case.

To fix this, I made the slot larger and added a little more margin for the plate and PCB (added 0.5mm to all sides of the cutout). I also made the case deeper and added a cutout for the underglow LEDs at the bottom of the PCB. I'm not sure how I want to do the hole in the bottom for the LEDs to shine out of, but a simple hole will do for now. I considered a grid of circles or a grid of hexagons but will have to try that out at a later time. The bottom may also become some frosted acrylic or something like that.

New case design.

After cutting it out of 1/2" MDF (I need to find some nice wood to make later cases out of), I got this:

Case!

My stock was most likely not level so one side was slightly deeper than the other, but the plate and PCB fit. You can see that on one side the lip for the plate is slightly higher than the other side:



I had to manually cutout a slot for the USB-C connection:

Finding where the hole should go.

Not the prettiest but good enough.

I didn't cut out the top plate wood yet (the piece that covers the plate and adds a lip around the keys), but I wanted to test screwing everything together:

Pretty good!

Temporarily using some keycaps from my Quickfire Rapid.

Bottom side. The LED under the encoder is not exposed.

And after adding in an encoder knob I had lying around the numpad looks pretty good:

Clean.

Next steps are to get a prototype of the top piece of the case made and get the RGB LEDs working. On the side I need to find and try out some different pieces of wood for making the final cases.