This week I secured my guinea pigs for testing! Wesley and Tia from Music tech said they would be willing to help. I plan to have them each play with the SmartBow and document what they like and what they think could be done better.
Also this week, I also began some more advanced modeling of my enclosure, and made a few prints (I had to fix a problem with my printer too, which took a good chunk of time and effort). In parallel with this, I also decided on the exact parts to buy. I picked some really nice buttons, a basic sliding switch, and the smallest DC power jack I could find. Finding buttons that were shallow enough to fit in my enclosure without interfering with any op-amps or capacitors was challenging. All of these parts are now ordered!
Since I was ahead this week, I decided to design my PCB early. I used kicad, and it went fairly smoothly. The most challenging part was getting everything to fit on the skinny board. Also, I had to plan ahead for what hardware would be mounted where in the final enclosure so that I didn’t accidentally place a tall component such as a capacitor where it would interfere with a button or switch or something. Here is the final design I settled on:
I ordered 3 of these boards from OSHPark and am awaiting their arrival!
Paul Odenwaldt Electronic Product Design 