You will want to test your design before committing a lot of time and plastic to printing it, or especially, the cost of having it laser-cut. You may have covered something that you didn’t intend to cover, your measurements may be slightly off, or you may have defined the rails to be so wide that they start to cover content on the tiles that’s important for understanding their purpose.
Unfortunately, there’s no fool-proof way to do this “virtually”. You can get a close approximation by comparing a your keyguard design to a graphic image of your AAC app. The instructions for doing this can be found on this page. Unfortunately, this method can’t be used to test the fit of your keyguard within the case opening.
You don’t have to print the entire keyguard just to find out that it doesn’t fit like you planned. It’s sufficient to print just the first few layers of the keyguard, cancel the print, and take the resulting print and compare it to the actual app running on the actual tablet.
The following video shows how this can be very helpful in verifying your keyguard design. In preparation for the video, we printed the just the first two layers out of twenty-five layers of several designs. Two layers took about 40 minutes out of an otherwise 3 hour print. Forty minutes sounds like a lot but the first layers are also solid and the first layer is often printed more slowly than subsequent layers.
While the above video doesn’t talk about it, there is an option at the bottom of the Special Actions and Settings section that allows you to limit your keyguard to just the bottom 0.4 mm. That just happens to be two layers – each layer being 0.2 mm in height. That will produce a sturdy mask that you can use to test the fit of your keyguard and you won’t have to watch your printer and stop it before it goes too far.
