Replaceable Faceplates

Published on 2018-10-16 in Electronic Barrette Hub.

While waiting for the PCBs, I decided to work on an idea one of my friends had for making this look less intimidating and technical: faceplates. Basically, instead of making the PCB itself look nice, which is a challenge in itself, I can simply cover it with a faceplate made of some lightweight but nice-looking material. For prototyping I’m going to use some plywood that I have handy, but nicer woods and other materials could be used instead.

So I fired up my trusty scrollsaw, and cut myself two faceplates:

The next step is cutting the holes for the multitude of controls and sensors on the CircuitPlayground board — we don’t want to have them completely covered. It’s going to be a bit of a challenge, I think, but hopefully I can make it work.

The plan B if this doesn’t work is to paint the plain PCBs that I have ordered with golden acrylic paint by hand, to simulate the patterns that would normally be etched on the PCBs in the fab.