Button Box Pro - better design for the button box for robustness

[geerlingguy]

It would be incredibly useful to make the button box design robust, simple to assembly, and most importantly easy/fast to install or replace.

The current design (see STL file or OpenSCAD model description in the resources folder) was made for one reason: to keep the buttons from rattling around on my desk so much.

A 'Pro' design would have the following improvements:

• Thicker walls and a thicker top to avoid breakage if someone were to put their full body weight behind a button press
• A bottom cover that would screw in place (or have some sort of magnetic or latch system to hold it)
• A keystone jack on the back that would allow prewiring the button connections into an RJ45 plug — this would allow for pre-assembly of RJ45 to GPIO breakout cables, and we could have a number of spares (my original design doesn't even have a hole to route the cable out, so I had to snip off a bit of the final print lol)

The wiring inside can certainly be improved quite a bit—I just hand-soldered a few ground wires in there due to laziness, but everything could be made with crimped connections:

A better design would allow for the button boxes themselves to not only be more robust, but also easily storable and reusable in future projects. It could also have mounting flanges or holes in the bottom cover so it could be more securely attached to a surface.

[geerlingguy]

We could also use this original design with some flaky buttons as props to be smashed.

"You didn't answer in time! Your buttons go bye bye"—BOOM, smash the box with a sledge hammer.

[geerlingguy]

We're leaving the final button box design up to the Beast team. They're working with some different buttons, box shapes, etc, and they'll give us what they can. We'll be prepared to terminate however once we get there.