April was an exciting month for us and we kicked off May with a few big updates, from a portable Project North Star rig to the injection-molded headset design for the Kickstarter campaign that has started to come together.
Motherboard enclosure for your portable North Star
The plan is to include a motherboard in the campaign to allow your North Star headset to be portable (yay!). We’re still testing and evaluating a few different motherboards, but pictured here is the ASRock 4×4 V1000M. It’s compact & light, and, with a little bit of work, we’ve even made it run off of a USB-C power bank.
Two cables, one combiner, zero glue
There have been a few improvements in our 3D-printed model:
- Our combiners now come in a single-piece set that easily snaps in and out, no glue needed (you can find the modified bracket design here!).
- The new hub design will let your headset (including a 6-DOF sensor) use only two cables instead of four. It also includes some great extra features like an integrated Arduino-compatible MCU with a Qwiic connector. We’re pretty excited about this one!
Watch our single-piece combiner set video or head over to the Smart Prototyping website for details!
Injection molded #KickstartAR design is in progress!
It’s still early days and we might even end up with a completely different design, but Jim, one of our mechanical engineers, is working on a pretty neat design for our Kickstarter headset!
In the meantime, you can get your Project North Star 3D-printed headset and/or parts at Smart Prototyping.