I had designed the circuit planning to use the Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE as the micro-controller, but between then and assembly time Adafruit released the Feather nRF52 Bluefruit LE which has a compatible pinout and has only one chip on board instead of having one dedicated to computation and the other one to Bluetooth LE, so I swapped that at the last minute and rewrote my firmware to support the new API.

Case

Having designed an all wood unibody keyboard, I wanted to experiment with something entirely different. While researching materials for this build, I remembered that a few months ago, I had come across Shapeways, an online 3d printing service that among other things does porcelain prints. Unfortunately, the maximum dimensions for that material doesn’t allow making a whole case out of it, so I had to find a workaround and I came up with the idea of building a segmented case: two porcelain end pieces with another contrasting material in the middle (my initial plans were walnut, but I ultimately decided that the visible part of that section should be leather).

With this in mind, I started putting things together in Sketchup. The body consists of four main parts: the porcelain ends, the walnut inner body, the walnut top plate, and the leather middle section. Because the top plate sits at a 7° angle, I designed the whole thing as a big brick, chopped its bottom and rotated it to lay flat. I also added two opening in the left porcelain part to fit a switch and expose the magsafe charger.