Devlog #6
I started rebuilding the case for the new PCB design.
After finishing the PCB layout with its diagonal-stagger switch arrangement, I moved into CAD to build a matching case, working through a much more complex shape than my first attempt since the board isn’t a plain rectangle anymore.

My first try at this was rough. I was eyeballing most placements, zooming in super close and manually nudging shapes by dragging until things looked roughly aligned. It kind of worked, but margins ended up inconsistent between edges, and rounding corners or offsetting the diagonal edge properly was nearly impossible to get right by eye. I ended up scrapping that entire first attempt once I learned Tinkercad actually has real alignment tools and exact coordinate input in the properties panel, instead of relying on visual snapping and guesswork. I threw away around 1.5 hours of work and redid the whole model from scratch using typed coordinates and the align tool wherever two edges needed to match exactly, which gave a cleaner result.

Also had to work out how to offset the diagonal edge specifically, since scaling a duplicate shape up distorts a diagonal edge into a taper instead of a consistent parallel margin, so I calculated the perpendicular offset separately from the straight edges to keep the margin even all the way around.

Overall, I got the base and outer walls built with a consistent 10mm margin, added 4 mounting holes using the guide’s direct-into-plastic method with 2.9mm holes, and rounded the four corners for a cleaner look.

I was also considering an LED backlighting idea, but decided to drop it since it would’ve needed a spare GPIO pin I don’t actually have on the XIAO.

Challenges:
I realized that I probably should have learned to use Tinkercad a bit more before jumping into the project, as I didn’t know how unreliable eyeballing was. Also I caught a mismatch between my schematic and PCB where a switch had been removed from the board but was still present in the schematic, which needed re-syncing.

Next Steps:
The case walls and base are done. I still need cutouts for the OLED window, encoder shaft, and USB-C port.