As of today, there are no more OG WTPAs!
The last 20 or so (of 200) took forever to get out the door.
Thanks, everybody, for helping make this happen. Thanks for all the feedback, and for the patience, and for giving me my first less-than-wack experience designing a product.
Hats off,
TB
(Note, there are still lots of benighted and lonely bare PCBs and microcontrollers for the H4RDC0R3)
Not content to rest on his laurels, Nick decided to build ANOTHER WTPA for his old friend Jonny who plays minimal techno on a fancy euro label as a present for bringing him over to Berlin to write some tracks. Again I had a chance to warm up the CAD deck and make this guy. He still has threaded holes, but everything is a little tighter than before. And he’s blue.
These cases were cut by my man Joe at Prototope who do a kickass job of laser cutting really fast, and are based in Manhattan.
By this time I got pretty convinced that churning out lasered cases was like falling off a log and figured the next WTPA ought to come with one as an option, albeit without the annoying thread cutting step.
xo
TB
This benighted ogre is a wonder put into this world for the express purpose of making sick children smile. He lives in the lobby of the Comer Childrens’ Hospital in Chicago, and was a really nice present that my old toy company donated. I more or less did the work for free in a really short time, and it was good experience.
Problem is there was a lot I didn’t know in 2005 (though it did not stop me from TRYING to design some complicated sensors) and in the time since then I’ve spent about a million hours putting band aids on less-than-ideal systems.
This is a picture of his brain extracted, waiting to go somewhere. I knew I had to fix it, I wasn’t sure when that would be.
Right around this time in the summer of ’09 my buddy Nick (who stuffs the WTPA kits, and who plays in a kickass band called Lazercrystal built a WTPA for his girl Lulu, Chicago bartender par exellence and all around lovely lady. I had been on an enclosure kick and decided that this was the time to get jiggy with QCAD for linux and actually make a reproducible laser cut enclosure. I still had to tap threaded holes in the edge panels, but everything fit the first time, believe it or not.
These are the results of that experiment and Lulu’s is still about the prettiest WTPA there is out there.
The buttons are a plunger extension made of acorn nuts, flathead screws, and spacers. They look good and work well but personally I find they feel a little hinkey.
xo
TB
