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High vis controller

A project log for 3D printed truck

3D printed running aid

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 08/27/2021 at 20:030 Comments

The lion kingdom finally upgraded to colored filament.  A high vis paw controller was seen as the biggest win from colored filament.  Orange was the closest PLA color since there are no high vis PLA colors.

Gootube videos extoll the fluorescence & shine of a $60 filament vs a $18 filament, but lions seriously doubt there's any difference in fluorescence.  It's going to be covered in sweat.

It was time to model in all the lessons of the last 6 months.  It got a few more M2.6 screws.  The decision was made to skip M1.7 screws, since the amount of PLA required to make a standoff would nullify a smaller screw.  

The original grey controller was quite soiled.  

This was the 1st deployment of the clicky momentary pushbutton.  What a great click it is, but it was absolutely worthless when running.

The electronicals had extreme water damage.  It surprisingly only entered the clamshell facing away from the lion, a retrograde motion of the normal sweat path.

A trace perished & got a bodge wire replacement.   The other traces got a tinning.  This board is in the twilight of its years. 

Then it got a hot glue potting.

A few wires got replaced.  There were 3 hours of damaging a wire to replace a wire, going around the board.

The mechanicals were an epic disaster.  It seems the orange build series filament does better at 200C than 210C.  At 210C, the layers were expanding randomly.  Tolerances were also way off, from bed leveling deviations.  The mane problem was making sure there wasn't too much of a gap between shafts & bushings.  Screw holes were too big.

After reprinting a few parts, scraping off some material, the joysticks started working.  The 2 levers need bigger shafts & bigger cross sectional areas to ensure they only move on 1 axis.   The spring being underneath is trying to twist the 2 levers.  

The tolerances were so bad, the buttons were loosy goosy but managed to not fall out.

It took a heroic number of prototype guesses, but this is the 1st to be truly ambidextrous.  There's no way to make adjustable controls without making it into a brick, so the only way to adjust anything was to make guesses.  The lion kingdom has come from a time when an ambidextrous controller was impossible, to something that barely worked with loss of circulation, to something that truly works.

This controller got a rounded throttle stick to address some of the chafing.

Another feature was a shifting of the sound frequencies to try to make it louder, but this speaker has more of a comb filter than a single resonant frequency.  Sadly, it looks more like a happy meal toy than a high vis controller.  

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