DIY Trackball

[ids]

Build your own arcade trackball: 3" Trackball
(ran out of orange filament, so finished it in white, hence the two-tone look)





And/or just encoder wheels:  Encoder Wheels
Tweakable for performance.

[NoMoUserNames]

Cool idea. Did you have any specific reason for building your own, or is it a "I just want to see if I can do it" kind of thing?

[ids]

Not much reason.  Was hoping to save ppl some coin, but not sure how much is actually saved this way.  Think it's about $3 in plastic to print.  Could easily be adapted to various ball sizes (haven't tried, but script is quite flexible).  Can also tweak the height to play with how much ball is exposed above your panel.  Easy to connect this to USB via a simple micro-controller or any arcade trackball to usb encoder.  Could use a cheap raspberry pi pico or arduino or whatever and find relevant code online to do this.  I have a pico doing this and keyboard combined, nkro, and very inexpensive.

The encoder wheels, however, let you tune the performance, getting a finer grained input from the device with more spokes, and vice-versa.  Should work with any trackball of this type (happ, betson, ggg, ultimarc, etc)

Did some atari volcano buttons a while back, so I guess this is just the next installment in arcade parts.

[NoMoUserNames]

I love the idea. It always feels cooler to me to build something yourself. This is just one more sign that I really need to just buy a 3d printer. Might be a good time to start dropping hints to my wife about a potential Christmas gift...

I know I've seen the rollers/bearings sold in a few shops, but where did you get the encoder wheels?

[ids]

The non-printed parts in that photo came from a real arcade trackball - except the pcb's, which I created.
If you click my first link, you'll find further links to various bits you can purchase, including encoder wheels.
However, the second link above is to a model to 3D print customizable encoder wheels.  Actually the trackball model has an option to only model the encoder wheel as well.  I've been experimenting with various options on these.

Where I live, local libraries will 3D print things for free, but don't tell your wife that till after Christmas 

Since this is "Build Your Own Arcade Controls", I thought these would be applicable here 

[PL1]

Will Happ red boards work with your trackball housing, ids?

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For anyone wanting to customize an encoder wheel, there is some useful info in this thread.
https://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,167034.0.html




Scott

[ids]

Will Happ red boards work with your trackball housing, ids?

They should technically work, but mounting them will require adjusting the model, or doing some post-printing wizardry to get them in just the right spot.
Loading the scad file into OpenSCAD will let you tweak a lot of details, including board dimensions, but cannot confirm 100% that it will work for any given board as I am unable to test it myself.  You could try, and then print just a subset of the model to test the fit.
The model optionally displays a green board of my own design, which is largely hard-coded, so the visuals wont help if you tweak parameters for a Happ red board.  This is def. something I can improve upon.
If you aren't up to the task with OpenSCAD, and you are in possession of red boards, I could provide the model tweaks if you can provide dimensions.
I would need board width, height, thickness, gaps around edge of board to slot into holders, details about where on the board the optical units are and how oriented and so on.

[PL1]

Thanks for the offer, ids.  Your OpenSCAD code looks great.   

The old UTrak is still going strong and I've designed/posted a number of OpenSCAD models both here on BYOAC and on Thingiverse.

Figured that someone might want to use Happ A052-1011-00 red boards with your model since they perform so well for Golden Tee and Marble Madness compared to some other optical boards like the old Happ A052-1010-00 green boards. (less waveform rounding ==> lower chance of backspin)
- IIRC the old Happ green boards fit the same as Happ red boards.

Unfortunately, no Happ red boards here so I can't help with measurements/testing.   


Scott

[ids]

Thanks for the kind words.

What kinda stuff have you modelled?

If anyone can provide red-board dimensions, I can certainly plug in the details.

Started testing my own boards - think I need to tweak my encoder wheels a bit, not getting quite the quadrature read I need.  Have set up a simple animation in OpenSCAD and think I found a good configuration.  Will print and test soon-ish.

[PL1]

What kinda stuff have you modelled?

A wide variety of (100+?) items over the last seven years from beam break sensor mounts to a toilet repair part, simple test prints to pinball drop target parts, Ikari Warriors (LS-30) rotary joystick handles/dust washer to a customizable SW yoke mount. (the current WIP)

The list also includes some specialized controls like the Taito Aim-n-Fire, a spring-loaded analog potentiometer baseball bat, a bike pedals to spinner adapter for Prop Cycle, a mini twin top-fire stick controller for BattleZone, etc.

A quick forum search for my posts containing "OpenSCAD" returns over 40 hits.

Some of the designs are on my Thingiverse page.  https://www.thingiverse.com/pl1/designs


Scott