Vr Tracker

I quite enjoy playing games in VR, I sometimes hang out and chat with my friend Rosia in vrchat and after messing around with using an old phone as a hip tracker and enjoying the increased feeling of presence in VR, I decided I'd like to get a full set of slime trackers, however being the techy person I am, and considering that slimeVR trackers are open source, I decided it would be a fun project to make some from "scratch".

Cheescake tracker

After doing a fair bit of research into the topic, I came across an alternative hardware design called Cheescake that was lighter and cheaper than the original design, so I went to order some populated boards from PCBway. Unfortunately they were out of stock on a few critical components, but I figured it wouldn't be too hard to put those on later with the microsoldeirng equipment from Ystumtec.

Soldering the missing parts turned out to be more fiddly than I expected, and I initially misunderstood how to attach the IMU board to the main PCB.

Thankfully in the end I managed to assemble all the boards with batteries, but it's always important to buy extras as I melted some battery leads on my first try.

Printing the cases proved to be a breeze, very happy with the colors.

Overall a fun project which helped me learn a lot about getting PCBs manufactured, what's best left to proffesionals and what I as a hobbyist can expect to pull off and gave me a lot of confidence in future projects.