Happy new year everybody!
Oh man, when you greeted me upon my arrival here at GH, I had no idea you were working on this project! This thing looks amazing and I'm definitely in the camp of "take my money naowwwww!" for this beautiful piece of work. Can't wait for it to finally become available for purchase.
BTW, are you still working in CG?
Thanks.
CG? Not like it used to be. The last "3D" stuff I made (with a team) was this robot:
youtube-Link doesn't work I guess? Here again:
The second pic is in an early stage. After adding all the motors, magnets and wires, it doesn't look as pretty anymore. That's actually one of the main difficulties. Have a removable flexible skin with precise connection points.
The animations in the video are done with a CG model, then transferred to the robot servos (old game development rule, never leave the animations to the programmers :-P).
When this project ended we put all resources on the Miniguru.
So if we wanted to try our own design the best way to get one of those pointers would be from a ThinkPad?
For the keyboard in the first post, I took a Trackpoint 4 from an old IBM rubber dome 'board. Can't look up the model # right now but it should be here somewhere. The advantage is that you don't have to make an extender.
Edit: IBM KPD8923
Lenovo holds the patent to the most up-to-date version of the Trackpoint design, while Unicomp owns the older version (that's my understanding anyway). Unicomp's is terrible--I just returned an Endurapro because of how lame the trackpoint was. Lenovo's version gets rave reviews and I was wondering if it's possible for a small indie guy such as lowpoly to license their Trackpoint to use in his MiniGuru? Would the cost be prohibitive?
I think the Unicomp patent expired. Al least the USPTO calculator said that some years ago. What Lenovo added after that - I don't know. I plan to use a commercially available stick that comes with its own patents.
We provided connectors for the Sprintek in the last revision. But right now I'm on the edge with even getting samples because of two independent broken sticks reported.