Vive golf club mount
About a week ago a workmate of mine discovered The Golf Club VR and has been hopelessly addicted since. He's not even a golfer, so clearly this game is onto something good! After giving it a go I started to get into it and saw that holding a vive controller instead of a club was really affecting my swing. Time to fix that.
The local golf store only had grips for sale ($8) so we also found some 12mm shower poles that fit perfectly and epoxied them in:
It fits well, apparently 12mm is the size you need for a grip like this. Then it was just a matter of dreaming up a way to put the controller on it in a way that wouldn't shatter windows if it flew off. You can find a 3d mesh of the vive controller in your steam directory:
steam\steamapps\common\SteamVR\resources\rendermodels\vr_controller_vive_1_5
Big thanks to HTC and Valve for putting it there! After some double checking with calipers I started to block it out in Rhino.
I've got a Davinci XYZ at home which is a basic turnkey 3d printer, and immediately started experimenting. Using the controller mesh I offset a section on the lower handle and made the rear bracket, and just eyeballed the top plugs. They could probably be simpler, but the idea was to both hold them in place along the rod, and stop them from rotating. So far the little barbs that are bolted to the rod seem strong enough, but I should print some spares incase of breakage. In the top plug there's an m3 screw and nut holding it together.
After two evenings this thing was done:
I'm pretty happy with that! Feels solid, somewhat dangerous, fixes the wrist lock and wiggle I had before. I feel the need to make a pun about making par...
I trimmed the tube a little and regret it, having the weight at the end of the stick makes the swing feel much more natural! Even if it might have cost a lighting fixture. Also, for v2 I should tinker with the plug sizing a bit, as you still need to slide the plug along the tube to get the controller off, I'd rather have it be that you don't need to unscrew that to get it in/out.
You can get it on thingiverse and try it out yourself:
