Beat Saber Handle for Vive Tracker - "Cotton Candy Cone" by cottoncandyenby

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Cotton Candy Cone
Lightweight Beat Saber Handle for Vive Tracker
The Cotton Candy Cone is a lightweight handle for using Vive Trackers as controllers in Beat Saber. The finger loops allow faster movement, more range of motion, and less hand and wrist strain than all grips on standard controllers.
The name "Cotton Candy Cone" is because it's light, and because my username is cottoncandy.
Controller
Weight
Notes
Valve Index Knuckles
194g
Vive Tracker with one-hand camera grip (a common setup)
163g
(Vive Tracker: 88g. The grip I bought: 75g)
Cotton Candy Cone
123g
(Tracker: 88g. Bolt: 23g. Plastic as I printed it: 11g)
I made this handle because I wanted to be able to control the sabers with my fingers, instead of moving my wrist and entire hand, but the Index Controller and the Vive Trackers with a simple cylindrical camera grip both required so much grip strength to hold on to that I couldn't. The finger loops on the Cotton Candy Cone allow you to hold on to and control the sabers with only two fingers, increasing range of motion and allowing your hand to relax. This is most noticable on fast up and down sections, which I can do with my palm sideways without even moving my wrist, but is helpful in every direction. You don't even need a wrist strap since it's so secure, even when holding the controller loosely.
You will need 2 Vive Trackers obviously, and it comes with all the pros and cons of that (cost, battery life, slightly worse but adequate tracking quality). There are guides elsewhere on the internet for how to set up your Vive Trackers for use in Beat Saber. Note that you can connect additional buttons onto a vive tracker (see the POGO Pin Buttons section below), so if you're into that kind of project, the lack of buttons doesn't have to be a downside.
You will also need 4" bolts to attach the handle to the tracker's ¼" camera mount. I used these partially threaded bolts from McMaster-Carr, but I've included bolt-4inch.stl if you want to try to print them.
Print the cotton-candy-cone-handle.stl and cotton-candy-cone-spacer.stl files.
Printing
Print the handle on its side. I recommend using support for the stabilizing pin, but not inside the bolt hole. In Cura, "Support Placement: Touching Buildplate" works well. You'll have to cut/sand the support off the fillets on the bottom, but you should sand the finger holes anyway because your fingers will be spinning in there a lot and you want them to be as smooth as possible.
I personally printed with PETG because I like the feel of it more than PLA, and printed with only 3 walls, 4 top/bottom layers, and 10% infill because weight matters more than print quality or strength.
I also added some tape on top to give my thumb a little more grip.
The spacer can be printed flat with no support.
POGO Pin Buttons
The Vive Tracker contains 6 "POGO pins" for connecting to accessories. I used these to wire up a trigger button and menu button, so I could navigate menus without reaching to the button on the front of the tracker. It's nice to have, but is not necessary.
You'll need buttons (I used these because they're small) and a bit of soldering. If you use buttons of the same dimensions as mine, they'll fit nicely into cotton-candy-cone-pogo-adapter.stl, which replaces the spacer. If you use a different size, you may need to change that design to fit your needs.
Sending a button press on the Vive Tracker is as simple as connecting the right pin to ground. Wire Ground (pin 2) to both buttons, Trigger (pin 4) to one button, and Menu (pin 6) to the other. I filled the pocket that makes contact with the POGO pin with solder to prevent the wire from slipping back out of the hole and to ensure a good connection, and then super glued the buttons and wires to the plastic.
To simplify things, you can skip the menu button (you can get the pause menu by hitting the system button on the Vive Tracker twice), or only wire buttons on one hand.
You can read more technical details about the Vive Tracker in the Vive Tracker Developer Guidelines.
Remixing
Please remix this concept, with attribution to this original post. I'd love to see what improvements people can come up with. Some changes I think would be good:
Make it shorter. I chose 4" bolts because I assumed I would need to fit the whole hand, but the index and middle fingers provide so much control on their own that the long tail of the handle just gets in the way, and it even limits range of motion a little bit. I think 3" or 3¼" bolts would probably be the right length, allowing the ring finger to still provide support and stabilization, allowing more range of motion in some directions, and cutting another 7 grams or so off the weight.
Make different sizes. The finger holes are 20mm inner diameter so they can spin freely on my average-sized fingers, but there are a lot of different sizes and shapes of hands out there. Simply scaling the model won't work, so new sizes will require editing the CAD model.
Add a vibrator. I experimented a little with adding a vibrator for the haptic feedback when cutting blocks, but decided that feature wasn't worth the effort. It might be worth it to you. I believe the vibration is powered and controlled by a 3 volt signal on pin 1, but you will need to do your own experimentation.
Support the upcoming Tundra Tracker. It looks like it will be much lighter than the Vive Tracker. It's still being designed, (It'll be released mid to late 2021. This is being written in Feb 2021.) but it will probably have a backwards compatible camera mount, like the Vive Tracker. But the real potential will be to remove the camera mount and heavy bolt, and screw directly into the tracker like another swappable base plate, cutting even more weight.
I've included the FreeCAD .FCStd file in case that makes it easier for you, but I'm new to CAD so I make no promises as to how usable it is.
Tips are accepted.