TPCast Vive Head Mount With Removable Battery by Nagorak

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

This is a head mount that allows you to connect the TPCast Battery Box to the HTC Vive with Deluxe Audio Strap (DAS). The basic design is based off of stu3d's HTC Vive TPcast battery holder. His design worked pretty well and I used it for quite some time. His mechanism for attaching the mount to the DAS was also really good and far beyond my capabilities, so props to stu3d: without his design this one wouldn't have been possible!
Unfortunately, when using the battery mount one thing I didn't like about it was that the TPCast unit itself wasn't attached to the HMD. As a result when you removed the battery the TPCast battery box either ended up dangling off of its wire, or you had to also remove it and set it aside.
With this redesign the TPCast unit itself clips on to the back of the head mount and can remain attached to the Vive regardless of whether the battery is plugged in or not. To attach the battery you simply slide it into the opening on the right side of the mount and it will be guided into place. To remove it just grab hold of it and pull it back out. In theory you can even reach back and swap the battery without removing the HMD from your head (unfortunately since the TPCast batteries aren't hot swappable you'd still end up standing in the dark for a couple minutes while the unit rebooted).
The battery is held in place using the friction from the USB plugs, which is surprisingly quite solid. Even jumping around or turning my head as hard and fast as possible I could not get the battery to come loose. I honestly think you might end up breaking your neck before the battery came off, but if you still don't trust it you can slip a rubber band around the unit for some extra support.
Update 5/24/18
Uploaded a new STL file that fixes a first layer issue on the previous version (part of the model was starting on layer 2). The end touching the printer bed is also no longer rounded, which isn't as nice but might be better for adhesion.
Please see installation instructions below!