In-Place Microswitch Holder for Arcade Button

thingiverse

I have no idea if anyone else will ever find this thing useful, but I created it, and it was indispensable for my use case, so I figured I'd share it. What is this thing? ------------------------ This is effectively the back-end of a standard 30mm arcade button that will friction fit into a the button hole when the actual button is removed. Why did I create this thing? ------------------------------------ I have an arcade machine that I custom built. The control panel of this arcade machine has some artwork that is covered by a thin sheet of plexiglass. This plexiglass is held in place by the arcade buttons being screwed into the control panel. I recently decided to do a refresh of the artwork on my control panel, but doing so requires the plexiglass to be removed, which, in-turn, requires all of the buttons to be removed. Each of these buttons is wired with a microswitch and an RGB LED, and the button wiring is quite involved, as the common wire for all of the buttons is daisy changed between the buttons. It can be nearly impossible to remove all of the button wiring and get things re-connected in the correct locations. In addition, if you move those wires around too much, the connections are prone to break, and it can be a real pain to fix those. This thing allows me to quickly remove the buttons, and immediately re-install the RGB module and microswitch into the same exact location. Since this is a friction fit from the bottom, rather than relying on the lip & nut approach from the original button, the plexiglass can now be lifted off once all the buttons have been replaced. When I'm ready to put the plexiglass back in place, it's a quick matter to remove the temporary holder and re-install the RGB module and microswitch back onto each original button. My wiring never has to move throughout the process, which makes getting things re-connected fairly trivial.