Moonrover Mk3

I've made a new version with 3 joysticks. My current usage of the 3 joysticks is to control Autodesk Fusion 360 in conjunction with a custom add-in script.

I've also never quite been happy with drag scroll, so now one of the joysticks acts as a scroll stick. This works as zoom control in Fusion 360.

BOM

See the MK2 for the majority of the BOM. Added in MK3:

• 3x Adafruit Joycon style Joysticks
• 6x M2x4 bolts (I bought an assortment off Amazon)

Hardware & Assembly

Again, follow the MK2 guide for the assembly of the trackball component.

The joysticks should slot into the holes in the housing.

For wiring, it's pretty straightforward:

The grounds on the joysticks should all be tied together (protip: try wiring the 2 grounds of each joystick together before trying to route the grounds to the microcontroller, I y'd everything together and the housing is quite cramped with a wire mess). 

I found that if you use some 28 guage wire, you can actually put the wire through the small holes in the joystick prongs, making it a bit easier to solder all the 18 wires you'll need to attach.

The joysticks have 2 wires each that need to connect to their own pins, make sure you're using analog capable pins on your microcontroller (the pro micro I used still had pins 8, 9, 18, 19, 20 & 21 available for me to connect the joysticks to).

Software

Again, follow the MK2 guide.

My updated keymap, config, and Arduino code now supports passing the joystick data. If you plan on using this how I am (with Fusion 360), you'll want to also get my custom add-in to install and use. Note that the custom add-in probably only works for Windows, sorry if you CAD on mac (but, I'd be happy to accept a pull if you manage to figure out how to do the hacky pygame install on mac).

Tuning

Follow the MK2 guide for tuning the trackball. I noticed when I had to shove all the wires in on this version, it caused some issues with the trackball alignment, so there might need to be some extra work to get it working well (I was able to fix it for myself by offsetting some faces in the model a bit to get the trackball sitting more correctly, these offsets are part of the model uploaded here).

The joysticks luckily are super straightforward, just plug ‘em in and go. All my code does have deadzone compensation since joysticks never sit at 0. I find it easiest to use the pygame example program to look at values coming out of the joysticks (the Arduino code also has some debug logging, but it’s nice to be able to use the pygame code to see exactly what's showing up to the computer).

Contributing

Again, a step file is included to make adding/remixing/tuning easier. If there's another format that people want I'm happy to share (but not my f3d file, since that's full of too much shame to share publicly).