I love the monome and the way it's shaped, but I also love the way the
buttons on my ES-1 feel.  For those not familiar, they are very similar
to the monome buttons except they are more rectangular shaped.  They
spring and press very nicely.  The main advantage in my mind is that you
could make an 8x16 that is much less wide.  I have spent the last hour
or so playing around in emachineshop trying to replicate these buttons.
After some playing around, I've made a button that (in 3d) is almost
identical to the electribe buttons (opened up the box and took
measurements).  Silicon and conductive rubber are options for materials
(it is mixing the two I am unsure about, but that can be resolved).  The
main cost is creating the mold for the buttons, but with an order of
1280 buttons (10 8x16's) the cost per button is $1.33.  It turns out
that fabricating keypad arrays is not cost effective at all for
emachineshop.  So it would be on a button-by-button basis.  I've
designed them to have holes for 3mm LEDs (though SMD would work too).  I
would of course be making PCB layouts for this, and we could do a bulk
order on that as well.

Since I am not planning on building 10 8x16's, I was wondering if anyone
would be interested in going in on these with me.  With these buttons
you could create an 8 x 5.6" or so 12x8, which I think is a bit smaller
than the current 12x8 planned. I would straight up buy the keypad kits
but the 40h buttons are already larger than the new ones, and size is
pretty important to me for fitting it into my tabletop setup.  So if
there is any interest, please reply, if not I will suck it up and get 2
keypad kits (not that there is anything wrong with the current keypads!
Just a very picky preference I wanted to see if I could pull off).

-Colin

P.S. - Monome, if there is any interest, will you pretty please look at
the dxf file for me with any advice?  I don't want to order a ton of
these and have them be bad in any way.

you're on your own on this one. we spend months of r&d and ridiculous 
amounts of money trying to get this right, with several retooling and 
revisions cycles, various durometer tests with different materials... to 
say the least it was not an easy undertaking (and we have a good friend 
who works at the molding company.)

my suggestions: cut one of your electribe buttons in half. measure the 
membrane size. then run a whole bunch of parts with different materials. 
"bad in any way" is a non-realty. they *will* be bad in one or more 
likely several ways. don't run your whole batch the first time. do 
revisions.

for the amount of engineering that went into the keypad kits for such a 
small run, the kits are generously priced.

Thanks for the reality check.  Thinking about prices, if anything was 
wrong with the first batch, I'd have to pay at least $800 more for 
retooling for the mold.  The kits are truly generous so thanks a ton for 
offering them and putting in all of the work to get this right..

-Colin

I am interested in your project.

Can you tell me about the mould?

I know people with a machineshop who maybe able to help.

Regards

Rob

I made the mold in emachineshop, it is shaped to the best I can tell 
like the electribe button.  I am unsure about exact thicknesses 
though...

-Colin