I made a box to simplify time tracking on common tasks. It has 12 arcade buttons wired to a USB arcade controller that plugs into my PC. I then wrote an Electron app using the Gamepad API to wire this up to start time trackers in Harvest.
This was a great project that taught me a lot about the design process. There were many errors in the design that were corrected post-print, like incorrect magnet placement, and the motherboard mounts were too frail and snapped off. Corrected with some hot glue 😉 The cord trap turned out perfectly on the first try, and ironically, it was the thing I was most worried about going in.
This was also the project where I started to get really frustrated with how difficult it is to make things line up in SketchUp accurately. Many of my mistakes were my inability to properly snap or line up something, so I had to eyeball a number of things. I found repeatedly the snapping tools often fail to snap where I intend, the orthographic views don’t restrict you to a plane, you can’t modify something to an absolute value, many things are hard to measure, etc etc.
It just sucks for precision work, there’s no way to sugar-coat it.
Anyway, for this reason I don’t want to share this design yet. It deserves better before others take it on. One day I’ll redo the files for this in Fusion, and I’ll post them here when I do.
Till then, just a gallery with some photos of the build!
