Making the lights

From MattGilbertWiki

racroz To make the pushbutton lights, I combined cheap LED's with cheap pushbuttons. The LED's sit on top of the pushbutton so that you can press the light itself. The LED is held upright by sitting in a hole in the front layer of acrylic, but their still needs to be something between the LED and the pushbutton. If you want to know more about how I came to choose this design over some other options, you can view the Touch Sensor Options research that I did about it.

First I had to make some mockups to make sure it would work.

The white disc that the LED sits on separates it from the pushbutton (so there are no accidental electrical connections) and also covers the hole in the white plastic.

When I was happy with the mockups, I ordered all the parts and began producing the LEDs. First I cut out the plastic discs with a drill press and a plug cutter bit.

You might say "why didn't you just buy little plastic discs". Well, a few reasons:

• I could cut them out of the same acrylic as the rest of the piece so they would match.
• I had other modifications to do to the discs, and cutting them out didn't actually take very long.
• I like making my own things.
• To keep cost down. I had the white acrylic left over from an earlier project.

Then I needed to saw a notch in the top of the disc so the wires coming out of the LED would sit nicely on top of the disc and not slide around.

I sawed two notches on the sides of the disc for the wires to pass through.

The wires coming off of the LED needed to be flexible so you could press the LED down without it getting stuck. I salvaged the wire from these old ATA cables I had. ATA cables are for connecting hard drives to your computer, so they have a lot of high quality wire. I took these out of some computers that a school was throwing away a long time ago because I knew they would come in handy.

I then wrapped the wires to the LEDs with a wire wrap tool, and soldered them together. This is a different kind of soldering than you do in metals class. This kind is much lower temperature because these electrical connections don't typically have to support much weight, and high temperatures could damage the electronics. They also use different types of metal.

Then I place the LED on the plastic disc and secure it, and remove the excess wire.

Now I've got about 150 LEDs to attach to the circuit boards when they arrive in the mail. I also did a few of other colors so I'll have some options to distinguish the "You are here" light.