Whew, this was a difficult one...
Now available in Thingiverse, my take on the
Mac IIcx Reset/NMI buttons.
The server crash ate my message about me recapping my new Macintosh IIcx, and the wanted- thread about me looking for the
programmer's switches for the machine. But yeah, I was looking for one.
Eventually I was able to bought one from
Herb Johnson's website where it was listed for sale. I asked for an used one, but he replied that he was down to only one NOS switch in stock. So I went with that. One of the last stocks of these gone then
I received the part and it was in a nice bag with sticker saying "For sale to Apple authorised service providers only" - cool. I started modeling it with SketchUp (which is an old version that doesn't work too well, but it's the only modeling software I've bothered to learn in any depth).
This is a difficult part as it relies on the springyness of the plastic and clips into place. I must admit it is very clever design, but it's just SO complex for being just two buttons on the front panel... It's also hard to print as it needs a lot of supports, which again are delicate to remove. Anyway, after couple attempts (with lots of tweaking between versions) I managed to print out one that did snap into place and would work! Due to the supports beneath the button-faces the result there was not that pretty (this might be tweakable, or one could separate the button-faces and print them separately and glue them in place). But I guess this is good enough to release and perhaps someone like me gets a machine without the part and this will be good enough for them
Also a shout-out to BleuLlama on Thingiverse who published a
simplified version of the switches just two days ago. Nice design and surely a million times easier to print than the original part!
Side-rant: Thingiverse is seriously broken
The site is slow. The editor messes up in Safari, in Firefox it works better but still won't update edited fields in preview. In some views the thumbnail shown is not the one I selected, sometimes it shows in wrong aspect ration. Less than 15min after I published the part, there is now a spam comment. Under the comment there is 'Flag'-button but that's to "REPORT AS INAPPROPRIATE. You are reporting Macintosh IIcx/IIci Reset/Interrupt Switch as a violation..." which is not what I want. Also the statistics show 106 downloads, which is clearly not correct (my older published parts have less than dozen each and those have been up for months or years now).