Sorry guys, no info on any new keypads or anything like that this time. I’ve been swamped with orders lately so a lot of development has had to go on the backburner while I fullfil orders. For now, here’s a post about my recent experience with Firefox. I actually have two other posts that are 95% done so I’ll try to finish those up too.

I’ve been unhappy with Chormium (the open-source but still very much a google product) for a while now, and started looking for a good alternative over the past month. I’ve tried schizophrenic Vivaldi, un-Googled Chromium which takes hours to compile, anemic extensionless qutebrowser, privacy focused yet lackluster Brave, and none of them really did it for me. The two things I’m looking for are more customization (or just an interface that wastes less space) and something more privacy focused, which leaves one choice.

I know I’m a month and a half late, but Happy New Year! I had some time off and I feel refreshed and ready to get stuff done. I’ve already made a ton of progress and I’m excited to be able to talk about it as the release is finally approaching.

Fightboard/DOA Controller

I’ve made a lot of changes to the Fightboard (name pending) since I left. Originally I just planned on making it a simple controller for Dead or Alive and calling it a day, but the more I work on it the more I think it’s a waste to not put more effort to support other games and allow for easier* remapping. I’ve updated the design a little bit and added a lot of features that I hope will make this a more universal controller that you can enjoy for whatever fighting game you play. I’m finally nearing the finish line on development. The physical design is complete and I’m nearing completion on the code, so I do plan on finishing it within the next week or two.

I did want to do these a lot more regularly, but somehow managed to make only three posts (including this one) in the whole year. I had a whole lot to talk about, but when it comes to writing about it, I’d usually rather spend more time working than writing about it. I have yet to make a post about my Shopify or even the updated models that have been up since September, so I’ll talk about everything a little bit, but I’m going to try keeping this as brief as possible as I have about 60 more keypads to make within the next 3 or so days between family visits.

I was originally planning on including this in a large summary post, but the development has taken a bit longer than I anticipated, so I’d like to take this opportunity to go more in-depth with my new controller:

I’ve been wanting to write a fun post about something for a while, and though it’s apparently been half a year since my last post, I’m happy to be writing something. Today’s subject is the order of operations when modeling in Fusion 360. This can be an issue for people who are new to modeling, so I’m going to describe how I made this simple knurled knob since there were a few ways I could have gone through it. The features used here aren’t specific to this model, so if you’re trying to get into CAD but aren’t trying to make this exact thing, this should still help you.

Hi all! Sorry for not posting as much as I’d like to, but I’ve been hard at work trying to balance order fulfillment and development. I actually have a few half-written posts that I never published, so I’ll try to include as much of that in here as I can.

Everyone give a nice, warm welcome to the newest addition to the keypad family, the 7K– sorry not yet. It’s the Touch osu! Keypad!

Last month, I decided that I wanted to remake the model for my keypads from scratch yet again, but this time with a special goal. I wanted to make a single 3D model with parameters for the key grid so I can use a single model for every keypad. This makes changing things a lot easier since one change will affect all models rather than me having to make all of those changes individually. I thought this would be quite the undertaking, since a lot of the features on the model seemed difficult to be updated. However, all it took was a little bit of extra thought and it was fairly simple. I got most of it done in one day and I’ve been printing these since I finished the model.

Last month there was a fire sale on the Printrbot Simple Pro. It was going for $185 down from its original $999 price tag (now $699 through Printrbot with the heated bed,) so I did the obvious thing and bought two of them. It features some amazing hardware with all nicely machined parts, nicely sourced motors, clean cable management, the Ubis 13S hotend, and Printrbot’s great gear extruder. It also has a healthy build area of 215x150x200 mm, which is big enough for almost anything.

Hi all. It’s been a log time coming, but the Future Tone controller is finally almost (95%) done! Now I have the original completed prototype and one with the fixed touchpad.

I’ve been content with the quality of my keypads for quite a while now, but since I built my Hypercube I’ve been trying out different settings to try to get consistent print quality. Amongst those was decreasing the extrusion diameter from .48 to .36mm, which in conjunction with a .25mm layer height gets prints done faster (3 minutes but faster is faster), looking a little bit better, and a little bit stronger.

Right when I got my first printer, I felt like I could make anything and fix any problem that I run into. I think this the same for a lot of 3D printer owners, but I think it was different for me because I actually had things that I really wanted to make. My full-sized Future Tone controller needed a bracket for holding the touchpad and analog sticks, I had just gotten some new curtains in that used clips that couldn’t attach to a curtain rod, and I wanted to start printing my keypads and making new keypads I couldn’t make before when I was just cutting cases by hand. I was never into any novelty printing nor did I need any benchmark prints since keypads WERE my benchmark.

First.