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Shameless self promotion. 
My little movie project i spent last half year of my spare time on.
Like or dislike, i am just glad it is finally finished 
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https://sf-apologetics.blogspot.com
Did you know that Avatar is actually a deceptively good SF film? Yeah, i was as surprised as you.
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I started working on an idea I had for some time.
I usually play with a gamepad in my left hand and a mouse in my right.
On the gamepad I have ship roll mapped to the left stick and ship forward and backward to the triggers.
Its not really ergonomic so I decided to build a mouse-like gamepad for the left hand.
The left mouse features an analog stick for the thumb, two buttons for the pointer finger (ship forward and backward), a psp jostick for the middle finger (ship up and strafe) and two buttons for the remenaining two fingers.
Also I want to have a dpad (4 buttons in dpad order) to use the wheel menues.
My prototype is made with an adafruit board and some buttons plus sticks and foam board + hot glue.
It already works but the buttons that are used are way to stiff and the shape of the device and order of the buttons needs some work.
The next step will be testing more different buttons and then designing a case and 3d printing it + assembly.
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That is awesome man! Well done! Looking forward to see the final product!
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I continued working on my left hand gamepad.
I searched for better buttons, and found some which seemed to fit my needs:
16mm Buttons
While these were beeing shipped to me, I designed a case around the components:
I was pretty happy with the result, but that feeling ended when the buttons arrived.
These buttons were the right size but in order to hold press you have to press a metal ring inside the button against two contacts (obviously) while a metal spring tries to depress the button.
The tension is much too strong to continuesly hold it pressed. I tried other buttons but this primitive switch design is used everywhere.
With my design now finished but unuseable due to the shitty buttons, I loaded it up to various 3d Printing service sites to have an idea about the cost.
One case was around 85 euros, it was too much for just one draft so I decided to order a 3D Printer Kit from china for 180 euros instead.
The solution to the button problem were keyboard keys, they have a very soft press and are easily pressable for long durations.
I designed a case for an analog stick, keyboard keys and a psp style analog stick.
While the printer was beeing shipped I ordered another psp-analog stick from a different producer, the first one was unuseable, the values I got out of it were so imprecise that it defeated the purpose.
Next was printing the design, it tooks about 26 hours to print all components (not including revisions) the biggest print was the outer shell with 15 hours print time.
Next I assembled everything and tested the components:
So it turns out that the other psp-style analog sticks is utter shit too. 
The values when centered are all over the place, depending where it was moved to beforehand, making it again unusable.
Maybe I received two duds, but I decided to not use a psp-style analog stick for my next version and use a normal analog stick instead.
Other things I learned from this draft is that having buttons for small finger and ring finger is useless because you have to be a piano player to be able to use all five fingers simultaneously, and because I wanted to have a button for each finger the case just got too large, making it uncomfortable to use.
For the next version I will change the psp-style stick for another normal thumbstick (isn’t really bigger and I can make an alternative stick end for ring finger use). Make the design smaller overall, and place the keys differently and include two more keys were it makes sense, also maybe leds.
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For any of you that are curious what I’ve been up to for the past 18 months, it’s been quite a ride.
Hoping to now get a bit more chance to play some more Battlescape 
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Figured I would add a little to the quiet place.
I’ve been working on a project relating to orbits around lagrange points that utilizes multi-body dynamics. The three body system is absolutely fascinating and creates all kind of unintuitive behavior. I’ve been working on the Earth-Moon system and I wanted to generate a family of orbits around L1 at various orbital amplitudes. Definitely one of my favorite images…!
I’m working on making a rotating gif so you can see the 3d-ness and the duckbill a bit better. The red dot in the center is L1 This duck bill extends towards the Moon which is at X=1 in these units. I think the inner amplitude orbits are around 5000km and the outer amplitude is around 12500km in real units.
Orbits around L1,L2, and L3 are inherently stable and most of those orbits get thrown off the Lagrange Point after 2-3 periods so it’s necessary to have active station keeping to do so. The purpose of the orbits is that, from Earth, the orbit appears to circle in a Halo around the object. This can be seen in the Y-Z plane from the plots below. This would be our point of view from Earth towards the Moon.
So I wrote a station keeping controller that would compute and execute a burn to get back to the reference trajectory that I chose(7500km, somewhere in the middle of the Family)
Where the red dots are everywhere a burn was executed. This was integrated for 5 orbits to make this figure but I’ve integrated as long as 10 orbits to ensure it lasts for long periods of time. 5 orbits corresponds with roughly 60 days and the cost for this maneuver was only a total of roughly ~4.5 m/s which is pretty cheap but expensive for HALO orbit maintenence. I could optimize a lot more.
Finally I wanted to try a larger amplitude orbit and I was surprised to see that it was sloppy.
I really wish I could create a gif of this because it would be really interesting to see in real time. It’s amazing how close it gets to the Moon(X=1) at around X=0.95 which corresponds to roughly “only” 20000 km away.
Anyways I thought all of this was pretty cool and wanted to share. Have a good one guys
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New Version. Its much better now and fits for my hand.
It still needs to be sanded and spray painted.
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These B(?) and F keys look hard to reach.
E and F, the F key is easily reachable by just extending my middle finger, the E key is a bit harder to reach, but reachable without changing the grip.
I use F as the view key and E as the target none button.
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