Wrapping up the prototype for retrogaming on the go.

 

A while back I started working on a gamepad for Apple II-series computers. It’s now time to make it an actual thing!

This is the perfect project for which to bust out the new 3D Printer. See how I justify its existence in my lab?  It’s so useful.

I said IT’S SO USEFUL.

Ahem.

 

Now then, as with any 3D printing project, step one is getting a 3D model of what you want to build. I knew I wanted to used my Parallax joystick, but getting the mounting points and rotation ball opening lined up just right can be quite tricky. I thought I could save myself some effort by modifying an existing model that is close to what I need. I dug up this cool project on Thingiverse:

 

 

It’s a homebrew portable game console, based on an Adafruit project. Super cool! It’s one of the nicest homebrew 3D models I’ve seen, and it’s conveniently broken out into modular sections. They have also done the hard work of lining up the openings for a thumbstick, and it has very nice joinery between the sections. I took the end pieces and mashed them together in 123D Design:

 

Never satisfied with doing one new thing at a time, I also took this opportunity to try 3D printing with ABS. Generally, you start out with PLA, which is a vegetable-based plastic with a hard surface. It’s easy to print with, so it’s a logical choice. However, ABS plastic has a lot of advantages. It has a nicer feel to the touch (it’s “softer”), and the resulting objects look and feel more like commercial products. It also has the big advantage that there is an easy solvent for it- acetone. Solvents for PLA tend to be of the “you don’t want them in your house” variety. A couple of options include Chloroform and Dicholormethane, but neither of those are particularly pleasant to use or easy to acquire. Acetone has some effect on PLA, but it’s not a proper solvent. Acetone will completely dissolve ABS, which is very useful indeed.

There are a few reasons a proper solvent is desirable:

1) You can permanently bond pieces together (they melt together and become one- far better than any glue)

2) You can smooth printed surfaces easily. This improves appearance and strengthens the piece greatly.

3) You can create a slurry to apply to the print bed for better adhesion (which prevents warping and other problems).

 

Acetone can be bought by the gallon at any hardware or paint store, so it’s very convenient indeed. The tradeoff for all this is that ABS is more difficult to print with. As you’ll see later, I have a fair bit to learn in this area.

 

Anyway, back to our model. This mashed-up gamepad model printed quite nicely in white ABS, as you can see here.

 

Unfortunately…. it didn’t fit. In a classic Blondihacks facepalm moment, I neglected to actually measure the mounting points and openings for the joystick. They looked about right at a glance, and I just assumed these sticks were some kind of standard, I guess. You see where this is going, of course. The Parallax joystick I happen to have wasn’t even close. The mounting points and opening are all incorrect and there was no making things fit.

Honestly, this is just as well. I wasn’t crazy about the overall shape and size of the Frankenpad I had created from that other person’s lovely model. Time to bite the bullet and dust off my own 3D modeling skills. I should have done this from the get-go. Software like 123D Design is so pleasant and quick to use that I was able to model my own gamepad, perfectly suited to my needs, in a couple of hours.

 

 

My concerns about getting things lined up right with the buttons and joystick were largely unfounded. Really, all I needed to do was take measurements off the pieces I had, make models in 123D Design, then design the gamepad around them. In the image above, you can see where I modeled the essential dimensions of the joystick and buttons (including tactile switches and mounting PCB). In fact, once you’ve done this, you can use simple boolean operations to make clearances and access holes for things. For overall shape and dimensions, I loosely modeled this on the Super Nintendo controller, although it needed to be a bit thicker to accommodate the analog stick. I’m still new to consumer product engineering, so there’s lots to learn. If anyone who does this for a living is reading this, no doubt you are rolling your eyes at the rookie mistakes I continue to make.

Time to print! Well, actually, time for a whole new class of mistakes. Now that I’m trying my hand at ABS, we have a few new lessons to learn about 3D printing.

 

That first attempt might seem swell, but if you look closely, you’ll see I did some hand carving of all the openings. Things didn’t quite fit, because ABS shrinks more than PLA does when printing. All of my openings were too small. Lesson learned!  There’s another problem, which you can’t see in this photo. The top half of the case has a big crack all the way down the side. I’m pretty paranoid about bed adhesion when printing, and I had heard ABS is particularly tough here. To compensate, I had the heated bed cranked up about as high as it would go (90°C), and used an ABS slurry on the bed. The latter is a technique were you mix up a solution of acetone and scraps of ABS (about the consistency of skim milk), then spread it on the bed. This is really, really effective. In fact, it is so effective that I couldn’t remove the piece from the bed without destroying it!

After getting burnt (figuratively and literally) with the superheated-bed-and-slurry approach, I dialed everything back a bit and reprinted the top half.

 

 

Yep, the second attempt warped quite badly because the bed adhesion was insufficient to overcome the natural tendency for differential cooling in 3D printed models. Clearly I needed something between “hot clean bed” and “crazy hot slurried bed”. For my next attempt, I cranked up the bed heat again, but still no slurry.

Note to self: Crazy Hot Slurried Bed is my next band name.

 

 

Running out of options now, I’ve gone back to the slurry method, and focused instead on finding a better technique for removing things from the bed. The trick is that you don’t want to damage the Kapton tape or the soft aluminum of the bed. That rules out things like pry bars, razor blades, and most metal tools. PLA models are also sometimes over-enthusiastic about remaining on the bed, but I have had good luck using large channel-lock pliers to twist them off (using a rag to protect the model from the jaws of the pliers). For ABS, that wasn’t working. These things were really stuck. I tried credit cards, plastic scrapers, a rubber mallet, and also swearing a lot. No amount of swearing seemed to help- I have plenty of data on that.

In the end, what worked really well was a weird tool (one weird trick?) that I found in the back of my toolbox.

 

This tool is metal, which I wouldn’t normally condone applying to your print bed in anger. However it’s not actually very sharp, and seems to have just the right angle on the end for popping things off the bed. It’s like dull paint scraper, or a very dull chisel, you could say. Whatever this thing is, I’m sure it was acquired at Home Depot (if you want one).

 

 

The opening for the joystick turned out to be a bit more of a challenge. Enlarging it would work, but would expose too much of the ball, meaning you can catch your fingers when the stick is moved all the way in one direction. The opening needed to be about 4mm higher up. That would have required printing all new pieces, and would have made the gamepad 4mm thicker. Instead, I opted to lower the stick by 4mm. Since the Parallax stick is designed to go in a breadboard, it has long header pins on the bottom. I can easily cut those off and lower my mounting posts to get that 4mm back.

 

 

You can see in these close-ups that my print quality with ABS is good, but not great. I’m still getting things dialed in and figuring out the tricks. PLA is definitely easier!

 

 

With the shell sorted, it’s time to get the electronics moved off the breadboard and into their proper home.

 

 

This circuit is so small and simple that I’m stepping out of character and not etching a PCB. I’m using Jameco’s prototyping board, which has square pads placed very close together. That makes it easy to use solder bridges to form simple circuits. The result is not very pretty, but it’s quick, robust, and effective.

 

 

Note the design details of this device; using mounting posts in the lower shell, floating the buttons on top of tac-switches held in by their openings, etc. These methods are borrowed from commercial consumer electronics. Whenever you take something apart, take note of how the components work together and how the enclosure is designed for easy manufacturability. These techniques are very powerful in the world of home 3D printing.

 

 

We need three wires to connect the joystick (+5V, horizontal sense, and vertical sense), and we need to connect the 9-wire harness coming in from the Apple II. It seemed easiest to use the PCB as the common point for all this wiring, so I ran a small harness between the two halves.

 

 

Next up we need the cord. Normally, I would do what a proper hacker does and make my own cable. However, the economics of cabling in the modern globalized economy are staggeringly perverse. The fact is, I can buy a perfectly well-made 6ft 9-pin cable for less than it costs to acquire the supplies to make my own. Never mind the time and the fact that a homemade one would not be as nice or as strong. Weird as it may seem, it’s cheaper and better to simply buy a commercial cable and cut it apart.

 

 

Next up, I needed to get out the meter and figure out which pins went to which wires. Luckily, in the prototype, I had taken the time to label my wiring with the numbering scheme used on the Apple II port. That made it easy to ensure everything on my new cable is going to the right place. This is critical, because a mistake here could fry chips inside my precious Apple IIc Plus. A triple-checked everything, but I confess there was still pucker-factor when I plugged it in and powered up for the first time.

 

 

Finally, we need hardware. The junk pile coughed up a nice selection of small self-tapping screws, which work great in 3D models. Print a 2mm hole in the middle of your mounting posts, and you can easily screw things in with whatever small screws you have lying around. I always keep the tiny screws from things I take apart. They require virtually no room to store, and might be incredibly useful someday. Like today.

 

 

 

I’m very pleased with how the final device turned out. It’s imminently usable, sturdy, compact, and thanks to open-source 3D printing, you can make one yourself. If was going to change anything, it would be the overall shape. It looks nice to my eye, but it’s not super comfortable to hold for long periods. It needs more rounding of the edges and such. It makes you appreciate why big commercial game controllers like the Xbox and Playstation have such elaborate organic designs. They need to be thick to accommodate analog sticks (like mine), so they hide that thickness in smooth drawn out shapes that are easy to hold (not like mine).

Enough talk, though. As the old saying goes, “The proof is in the Lode Runner”. Does my Apple II Gamepad perform in the field? Only one way to find out.

 

 

 

Yep.