Fully 3D Printed External Battery Head Brace Mod for Oculus Quest 2
Introduction: Fully 3D Printed External Battery Head Brace Mod for Oculus Quest 2
Hello, and welcome! My name is <PERSON>, and I'm a Freshman at Suncoast Community Highschool in Florida. I am currently an IB student at Suncoast and as part of my program, I am required to create a "Personal Project" over the summer. As for my choice, I chose to learn about some Fusion360 skills and challenged myself to apply them in a project. I've already created my first project utilizing Fusion360, xMod an affordable, sustainable, and modular alternative to traditional housing, and you can check it out here: xMod Instructable. I've now moved on to create a solution to a problem I've been having for a long time now: short-live battery life on my Oculus Quest 2. To fix this problem, I created an external battery mount for my Oculus that also serves as a head brace that balances the weight of the headset evenly. Like most of my Instructables, I will take you through the design process step-by-step and hopefully teach you some new things that you may not have known previously. Additionally, I will also show you how to assemble and mount the external battery mount. I hope you enjoy, and let's get started!
Supplies
Supplies Used
-Hatchbox Orange PETG Filament - 1.75MM, 1KG Spool - Link
Parts Used
-3D Printed Oculus Brace MK2 - 1x
-3D Printed Battery Mount - 1x
-3D Printed Oculus Brace Buckles - 2x
Tools Used
-Prusa I3 MK3S+
All STL, STEP, and G-Code files that I've used can be found on my Printables Page. You can use the STEP Files to modify any aspect of the original design to suit your particular VR Headset
Step 1: Creating the Head Brace
Unlike my previous instructables, in this instructable I will going through the steps of actually modelling the part so that you can modify the step files provided to suite your own VR Headset. I'll also go through some tips and some other details that got me to the final product. Now, lets get started!
Design Steps
1.) First, I created an ellipse that suites my brother and I. I got the measurements for the ellipse by simply measuring the length and width of the lower back part of the head, the occipital bone (I guess memorizing the parts of the head in biology does actually come in handy XD). 737
After measuring both of our heads, I just averaged out the measurements and got 125x100MM. You could also design several head braces customized for each user because they are easily swappable.
2.) After created the ellipse, I created a line tangent to the ellipse near the bottom of the ellipse. The length of this line will affect how concave the head brace will be, so you can adjust this value to your needs. After creating the line I just mirrored the line across ellipse and then trimmed unnecessary part of the ellipse.
3.) After trimming, I offset the ellipse portion by 20MM to create the main head brace. I then went on to create a 12MM line at 90 degrees to the tangent line. I then finished creating the main head brace profile by connecting the offset ellipse and the 12MM line.
4.) With the profile created, I then filleted the corners on each side by 6MM. After that, I connected the center points of the fillets to create a line and then connected the points where both lines meet the ellipses. I finally connected the midpoints of the lines I created. This line would serve as the mid point for the buckle that makes the head brace concave.
Background Info - You may be wondering "How did you know that buckling the corners would make the brace concave?". I got this idea when I was fiddling around with a paper, if you pinch and fold a piece of paper over itself, the paper will become concave. I applied the same idea to the head brace so I wouldn't have to model it concave from the get-go and have to waste a lot of filament on supports.
5.) After creating that line, I created the holes for the buckles to fit into. I made sure to leave some extra space so that the actual buckle would easily fit into the holes. For example, in my scenario I used a 4.5MM base and 8MM head for the buckle so I would make the opening hole 8.5MM and the locking hole 5MM. I used the same principle throughout the design.
6.) Lastly, I extruded the profile to create the main brace. 276