Battery cover for wireless keyboard

thingiverse

The battery cover on our Keysonic wireless keyboard (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/104608) broke: the prongs failed resulting in a failed power, lost batteries and intense frustration. So we printed a new, improved replacement cover. Yes, 3d printing can produce something useful! The original cover was recreated in qcad. The areas that experience most strain were reinforced with ribs or by thickening, while the flexibility of the latch was increased by lengthening the slot in the cover. After the second round of printing we had something robust, with a snug fit, that keeps the batteries in. One risk of the current design is that the support buttresses for the prongs are quite fragile and can be torn off in the printing process. This can result in malformed hooks, but in our case everything came out fine. The keyboard cover was printed on a Stratasys Dimension 768 SST, with breakaway support material. Feature resolution is 0.5mm. Instructions To print a keyboard cover for a Keysonic keyboard, just use the STL file. If you need to modify it for a different keyboard or remote control or miscellaneous battery thingy, start with the DXF. It consists of five layers: "front", "top" and "bottom" provide the corresponding perspectives of the object, while "remove" is used to trim away some artefacts from the extrusion process. Layer 0 is used for construction lines and not utilised in the creation of the STL. Openscad was used to create an STL. The SCAD file extrudes the various layers in the DXF and assembles them into the final object. If you have made significant changes to the DXF, it may be necessary to modify the positions of the faces in the SCAD file. Export the new STL model from openscad, and you should be ready to print.