We’re pretty sure that most of our readers already know it by now, but we’ll tell you anyway: the Hackaday community (writers and readers) is currently developing an offline password keeper, the Mooltipass. As it has been more than two weeks since we wrote an article about our progress, today’s will be about the Mooltipass front panels and our beta testers program.
At the end of our mechanical design rundown article we showed that we were originally planning to put a slightly tinted acrylic panel on top of our device. We however could still make out the Mooltipass’ insides, which wasn’t in line with the nice professional look we wanted. We then designed another front panel, one which was transparent above the OLED screen/LEDs and opaque (black) on top of the rest. To our surprise the result still wasn’t as good as we had hoped, as the contrast between the front panel and the screens/LEDs was too big. We finally came up with the panel shown above (see GitHub repository folder) which combines the two techniques previously described. As it is still in China, we’ll show you the final result when we get it in our hands.
We launched around 10 case prototypes in production, they will soon be shipped to our current contributors/advisers together with the smart cards chosen by Hackaday readers. In the meantime we sent our official call for beta testers to our mailing list recipients and hackaday.io followers, in which we asked them to fill a small form that will allow us to know them a bit better. We asked about their home/work computer setup, their level of expertise, their willingness to contribute to the prototype cost and finally specifics about who would use the Mooltipass they’d receive. We are targeting a broad range of users but also testers that will provide us with detailed feedback and clear bug reports.
We also spent quite a while searching for cheaper alternate parts that could be sourced in relatively big quantities. This is usually an overlooked aspect of a project so we preferred to tackle this as soon as possible. In a few weeks the contributors and I will receive all the components required to assemble our final prototype (front panels / case / top & bottom PCBs / smart cards) and it will be time to write a new update. Want to stay informed? You can join the official Mooltipass Google Group or follow us on Hackaday Projects.
Where do you get front panels like that made? Is there a service like for PCBs and Stencils?
I actually don’t know!
I contacted dozens of companies throughout the world and when I innocently asked my usual part sourcing chinese guy he informed me he knew some company that could do so.
I just had to give him the DXF files and let him negociate…
I should also mention that I had him find several tinted levels (?) with different front panel thicknesses…
Cheers, I’ll keep a look out, doesn’t look too difficult to DIY a nice front panel with toner transfer and paint onto acrylic:
http://valvesphere.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/diy-front-panel-in-acrylic-plexi.html?m=1
I assume areas could be masked off.
I wonder how a pattern 3D printed onto acrylic would look, could ‘print’ the whole enclosure onto the back of a piece of acrylic!
Nice looking panel.
I skimmed a couple of the links and log but cant see any mention of which company is producing this panel, anyone know? Important to me as a lot of great projects are let down by poor enclosure design (mine included) and I have yet to find any manufacturers who will bother making a limited run prototype case or panel, I tend therefore to re-cycle cases from commercial equipment where I can get them and the results are sometimes surprisingly good IMHO.
http://rodyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/cpr3.png
Just a note that I did a similar password keeper design in 2007 by ripping the guts out of a $20 USB 125Khz RFID Reader off ebay and popping my own pic18 based hid/usb and RFID which I used for the master key (just copied the original PCB footprint and it fitted great then used the coil out of the original unit in the new one) It still works though a couple of parts are no longer made, it doesn’t properly work with windows 8, and the source was in MikroPascal, which was nice, but not free and my customer at the time was pushing I use C. About 2 years ago I lost all my stored passwords due to some unidentified reason, probably a bug, and it took ages to change them all again, still using it but now also write the passwords in a secret book! I thought of redesigning it sometime but now I’m probably going to wait for yours :-)
Has HAD come to its senses and adopted the GPL for this project?
Hackaday isn’t directly involved in mooltipass…