This is how I feel lol.
Man, now I have to explain it in more detail? Dangit lol jk. Let me try my best to do so.
So here’s what we need to do at the very least for the B2B guys (who are funding this project):
- Backlit buttons so that you can laser etch out words
- Dual LED’s on each side that can change colors for notifications and to let you know the load is on/off, etc.
- Virtually no light leakage
- They want it to look similar to a competitor (can’t disclose it, but I’m sure everyone can figure it out – they’re big in the B2B/high end space, no one that we directly compete with)
They don’t care about the mockup I showed as they don’t carry the Fan/Light Canopy and don’t have a need for the long LED’s. This is an Inovelli thing bc we want it.
Knowing that we’re building off of our competitors switch, they have backlit buttons too as well as buttons that run down the right side of the switch.
This is what theirs looks like under the paddle:
To achieve the backlit buttons, they have a row that runs down the middle. If you look, you can see how the light dissipates outward in sort of a, “fan” approach as shown by the red lines.
To achieve the LED’s on the right side, they have a metal piece that helps control the light so that it doesn’t leak into the center as shown by the purple lines.
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To achieve the LED Bar, we’d have to do something like this:
The LED’s on the side in the example above would do the same thing as the middle LED’s in that it would, “fan” out the light.
However, the challenge here then becomes light leakage into the other LED’s above/below. For example, this would work for this design:
But not this design (which was one of the requirements of the B2B client):
I proposed something like this (the white part would overlay the LED’s to help with light leakage) to initially solve for the LED Bar on the left:
But the problem still exists with light leakage for this design:
We could build a special paddle that has some sort of blocking mechanism, but that’s where the increased tooling costs come into play.
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Hope this all made sense. I’m still waking up and have paint fumes running around my brain from all my painting this weekend lol.