I carefully designed the lasercutting outlines for the plates, yielding a total of six plates. Each of the three connector types - Power Supply Module, Relay Module and Electroluminescent Panel Module - have a pair of plates. The lower plate has .07" diameter holes cut through the maple hardboard, into which the nylon holders of the mini-WASP pins will be pressed. The upper plate has .03" diameter holes that are large enough to allow the wirewrap post tails of the pins to stick through but will retain the nylon holders.
The power supply plate only has 12 pins, but the relay module plate can hold 137 and the EL panel plate an even more numerous 160 possible pins. In my current project I will partially populate the three plates as I don't need every connection. For example, the relay module only uses 81 pins while the power supply is just 7 to 9.
CONCERN OVER ACCURACY OF FABRICATION
I did the drawing using Inkscape, which is a freeware alternative to Adobe Illustrator. It allowed me to be very precise in the sizes and spacing of all the features. This is essential as the nylon holders must fit in the holes and be spaced in a grid with .125" spacing pin to pin.
When I uploaded the design file to Ponoko.com, their system showed the size of the group of plates to be almost twice as big as in my drawing. This was quite concerning as accuracy was important. Their FAQs recommend changing the size of the group manually on the website, which I did.
However, my drawing is a collection of six plates with spacing between them, thus I have to hope that they determined the bounding rectangle or size of the group exactly the same way that Inkscape does when I select everything. If this is true, then they should scale properly. However, there is a very real danger that my $55 order will arrive late next week with the plates larger or smaller than designed, rendering them useless.
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