Copying from the Zigbee update:
Quick update: We’ve had the engineer relook at an alternate design to try to keep the paddles flush and the gaps between the paddles consistent as that was the struggle at CEDIA with the 3D prints.
The two solutions were to use the current, “lever” design:
or a, “fulcrum” design:
The fulcrum design was great at making sure the paddles were flush, but the issue became that the depressing of the paddle became inconsistent as you could not press the paddle down in the red area:
We noticed a competitor used a similar design and the way they overcame it was to make their buttons rounded (think convex buttons) which forced the end user to push the button in the middle. Unfortunately, we just did not like the design of the rounded buttons.
This left us with the lever design and after some thought, the engineer said the following (yesterday):
So, yesterday, I went ahead and approved tooling with the lever design and am putting my trust in them as they’ve never let us down and he’s a great engineer. He knows what we’re trying to accomplish, so this is one of those, “I’m skeptical, but please pull it off, I trust you” type scenarios.
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Next steps are that they will open up tooling and get some actual samples created and will test it with the official plastic (not the 3D printed stuff).
What we’ll likely do if there is still an issue that can be fixed is send out the beta samples so we can at least start testing the firmware while they fix any tooling issues, but I am crossing my fingers that there won’t be any.
