Diffusor too heavy?

[rkiesler]

Hi! I have the blinks dev kit, I have put together:

• the blinks
• the diffusor plate on top of it (the blue part facing to the pcb) and
• the silicone on top of both

Unfortunatelly, while the LEDs look great that way, the tactile feeling seems to suffer and the button seems to be constantly pressed, too. Is this a known bug? Will there be a fix for that?

Currently, I’m playing around with taping the silicone, which helps a little but isn’t a very good solution.

Thanks!

[jrcwest]

Hey there @rkiesler,

It is a known issue for the beta dev kits, I asked about it in the general feedback thread. Jonathan gave a good explanation, and offered a bit of a workaround that he found useful, which simply involves placing some packaging material beneath the diffusor to give the button a little added support.

General Feedback

@jrcwest, you are correct, the acrylic diffusers underneath the silicone do hold the buttons down which was not intentional, but an artifact of being beta. (tl;dr – The more in depth reason this happened, the original silicone was softer, a lower durometer, and didn’t hold the button down like this, but it caused the Blinks to misalign frequently since the sides were grippy. To fix this alignment, grippiness issue, we made the silicone a little harder and used a low friction formula,…

[jbobrow]

@rkiesler

the diffusor plate on top of it (the blue part facing to the pcb)

Just a heads up that the blue material is just a scratch guard for the acrylic diffuser (it can be peeled off with your finger nail).

As @jrcwest mentioned, the work around for using dev-kit Blinks with the diffuser and button functionality requires a little hack, placing some clear packing foam between the Blink and the diffuser can make this work. Given that the dev-kits are built for development, we included the diffusers to make sure developers can tune the look and feel of their games, but the dev-kit are surely not the refined product that the commercial sets will be. (That said, I think they have their own charm, but I am biased )

[rkiesler]

Cool, thanks. Well, for me, it was important to be able to update / add games, so the choice for getting the dev-kit was easy (unfortunatelly, I can’t yet program the blinks, I started a different thread about that).

I played around with bubble-wrap, while a bit fiddly to get it right it seems to do the trick, thanks.

Also, thanks for telling me about the peelability of the blue layer. Wasn’t sure, didn’t come off too easy so I left it alone.