This is good conceptual design, in theory.
Here’s my submission for the contest, there’s two layers in order to give a ‘compliant material’- (a fun youtube rabbithole!) -style flexing without fear of it snapping or having it wear out within a reasonable lifespan, all while being regular solid PLA or other solid plastic material variants. I designed it to have large tolerance for entry level 3d printers that might not have better than 0.4mm tolerances. The test print only takes about 16 minutes to print, and would give you a tactile feel of how it works! It’s also the same footprint currently used in the 3D model in order to make sure it is compatible. Heres a github link to said STL! https://github.com/HairyGaryWasTaken/FrameworkSTL.git
Here’s a picture of the file after printing, don’t mind the flex-plate texturing on the bottom from my printer.
One winner and one technical achievement award were announced!
Congrats guys! @_tweedge & @thedarktigger
This raises another little potential enhancement.
Shape the peg so that it isn’t solid, and protects the smd button from being pressed too hard.
I’m not looking at the motherboard right now, but the ideal would be the button contactor has two parts with 2 properties:
1 - One part bottoms out hard on the motherboard, or on the perimeter body of the button component (not the moving part, the soldered part. But ideally it should hit the pcb instead of the button body if there is any good spot for it.
2 - The part that actually presses the button should be springy and impossible to press any harder the hard enough.
This is pretty much how all normal buttons work except very cheap things like remotes or calculators. Good keyboard keys for instance mechanically bottom out and you can press them as hard as you want, the contact inside doesn’t get hit any harder, if there is even any contact at all vs hall-effect, optical, capacitive, etc.
Sounds fancy but I bet it can be done even with basic fdm printing. Two kind of prongs, or at least one, that hit the pcb next to the button (the more the better, to reduce wear on the pcb, go all around the button if possible and use all available open pcb space to make as large a contact surface as possible) and a bent leg in the middle, maybe with the main post offset so the leg can be a simple single bend rather than some kind of zigzag that won’t print reliably. Maybe two joined bent legs to make it more stable and stronger, like opposed leaf springs on a vehicle or those bouncy sneaker things.
… ok I need to make a drawing…
Congratulations to the winners. The Technical Achievement design is especially brilliant!
@Marissa_Buyck It would have been appreciated if the Framework team officially concluded the contest on the forum, in addition to Twitter. Due to the results only being announced on Twitter, it gives the impression that the official forum comments weren’t considered. Thank you.
Thank you to everyone who submitted incredible designs for the power button contest. The contest is now closed!
The winner is Chris Partridge (@_tweedge), who created a simple and intuitive design that we love!
To see original submission: https://twitter.com/_tweedge/status/1560330781851095048
We’re also providing a technical achievement award to JimmyJammy (@thedarktigger), who made an impressive mechanism.
To see original submission and more pictures: https://twitter.com/thedarktigger/status/1560760580146745345
We’ll make both available on GitHub (and both are getting a Mainboard)!
The updated power button designs are now available on GitHub: Mainboard/Mechanical/Printable Case at main · FrameworkComputer/Mainboard · GitHub
Massive congratulations to both the winners and all the participants!
Every single design on here was super creative and it has been amazing to see this contest run its course.
Thank you FW for letting us participate ‘cause it came out great.