My DIY HUI DAW Controller

[bjosephs]

Why did you choose TPU over PLA?

A few reasons. I wanted soft touch knob and thought the flexible filament would achieve this. The fitment to the d shaft is easier. PLA has a risk of breakdown over time (it is biodegradable and UV sensitive). In general I prefer PETG for my parts and carbon fiber PETG specifically. The TPU is flexible but also slippery so I may try making a TPU core and gluing a CF shell over it.

I used Sifam Collet knobs for my controller, and i think they're great.

If I could find some black, no indicator, ~15mm types in distribution I’d grab them. I love collet knobs. But Selco and Sifam are hard to shop for. A few audio places have gray but the wrong cap types. I think Elma makes a variant but there are no pictures on Newark’s website so I need to go digest another data sheet. If you have a lead please share it. I’d rather buy than make in this case.

I've also been thinking about molding my own caps for cherry mx style switches.

I had a midi controller project a while back that put me down this direction. I think I may revisit it someday, but there are a lot of different types of silicone RTVs to try and understand. Plus making a mold, figuring out how to manage air bubbles… I’d need some real scale to justify it.

This would lower the price for a potential v2. Also i tend to prefer mechanical switches to tactile switches. That's why i used e-switch LP6 series for the transport and automation section on my controller.

Those are nice switches. For a while I’d hoped that they’d have like a 30 to 32mm tall variant available so I wouldn’t need a mezzanine board. I could just stick a really tall switch up through the front panel right beside the fader.

Did you link any pictures of your controller anywhere?

 

[totoxraymond]

If I could find some black, no indicator, ~15mm types in distribution I’d grab them. I love collet knobs. But Selco and Sifam are hard to shop for. A few audio places have gray but the wrong cap types. I think Elma makes a variant but there are no pictures on Newark’s website so I need to go digest another data sheet. If you have a lead please share it. I’d rather buy than make in this case.

I used Sifam S150 0006-BLK: https://www.sifam.co.uk/product/s150/

I bought them from Radiospare back then but it seems they don't have this reference anymore... it's a shame, these are really nice knobs, perfectly balanced in my opinion.

I had a midi controller project a while back that put me down this direction. I think I may revisit it someday, but there are a lot of different types of silicone RTVs to try and understand. Plus making a mold, figuring out how to manage air bubbles… I’d need some real scale to justify it.

I've been googling a bit this morning and found these relegendable keycaps that look interesting:

https://xkeys.com/products/accessories/keys/keycaps/orig-relegend-keys.html

Did you link any pictures of your controller anywhere?

I thought i had a thread here somewhere but I can't find it anymore.

Here's the link to the midibox thread I made:

http://midibox.org/forums/topic/21149-midibox-daw-controller/page/2/

Pics are old but the controller Hasn't changed much since then. Software evolved a bit and is still evolving.

I might switch to 3 touchscreens in the near future. And I would also like to experiment with touch sensitive encoders / joystick.

 

[bjosephs]

Here's the link to the midibox thread I made:

http://midibox.org/forums/topic/21149-midibox-daw-controller/page/2/

That’s so rad. Nice work.

 

[bjosephs]

TPU felt nice and was really easy to tune for fit on the encoder shaft but I couldn’t get past cosmetic issues with blobs and strings. So after like 25 iterations I made a decent little knob using carbon fiber PETG. I learned a lot about settings here, as well as relearning the importance of dry filament, and made some improvements to how I arrange my setup. Probably the tops could be better but I was getting good adhesion and didn’t want to smash them into the build plate much more. I’m printing them upside down so the encoder shaft cavity can be set in a bit and sit lower visually on the encoder.