Lesson 67 - Modding Switches

Today I got a shipment of electronics. Me and my little girl were both excited to open a bunch of envelopes to see what's inside; we have been waiting for some more Arduinos and mechanical switches for our upcoming Electronic Instrument. She immediately recognized the Arduinos, of which I was kinda proud.

The switches were a disappointment though. Colorful and all, but unfortunately of the "latching" type, meaning a switch that stays down when you press it, and comes back up when you press it again. And that just won't do if you're planning to build a keyboard for a musical instrument, will it?

So, we started "modding" the switches be removing certain parts from inside. We had 15 switches to mod in total so there was some real work to do! You'd thing this would be tedious and boring for a 6-year old girl? Nope, not at all. Even the 3-year old helped the best she can. In the end, I was the only one (not counting the 3-year old in) unable to open the plastic casing of a switch without breaking it. 

So the 6-year old can now mod a switch without any adult help, and does it better than me... And here they are, all 15 switched, modded by willing child labor!

Then we did some design on how the instrument would look like.

Next up: woodwork. We need to build a casing for our thingie. And maybe we need to visit the local "recycling center" to scavenge some parts, including a little speaker element. The Hartke element might be a bit too heavy-duty for our use case, weighing 1 kg or so. You can see it in the picture too. Quite a monster, ain't she?