TL;DR: I made custom Nintendo Switch Joycon Controller holders in the shape of Star Wars Y-Wing and A-Wings.
I’ve been traveling quite a bit this year, and my Switch has been a great companion surprisingly easy to bring around. However, the biggest gripe I and everybody else has with the device is that it is no fun to use the controllers in single joy-con mode. I found and printed some neat grips that make it a bit easier to use them in this mode, but I’ll cover them in a future post.
In this project, I made some ridiculously tardy birthday presents for two of my Switch-owning friends: Y-Wing and A-Wing Joycon holders. Honestly they aren’t that practical, but they technically *are* functional, and I think they look pretty cool. I started by downloading STL files from thingiverse of various Star Wars ships and a simple dual-joycon holder.
In Fusion 360, I chopped off the joycon rails and saved the bodies as separate components so I can reuse them in multiple projects. Next, I started processing the Y-Wing by simplifying a lot of unnecessary mesh details, cutting off the engines, then making the mesh into a solid body. I inserted the joycon rails where the engines used to be and played around with the scaling of the Y-Wing body to fit well. From there, it was a simple merge bodies, slice, and print… or so I thought.
Unfortunately, I messed up some of my slicing settings in my first attempt, and part of the print fell over. Even though part of the print had failed, I was still able to do a geometry check, and I was pleased with how well the joycon and strap both fit into this model.
My slicing error was in a boneheaded misconfiguration of adaptive layer settings. Using adaptive layers in slicing software allows for faster prints since the printer is programmed to use larger z-steps if it is safe to preserve model details. The base layer height for this was 0.12mm, and by entering the deviation to 0.2mm, for some reason I thought I was setting the absolute height limit for the print to 0.2mm, but this was not the case, and my printer was trying to print with 0.32mm layers, which it just was not able to do. On my subsequent attempts, I dialed the deviation back and was able to get a really nice print.
Y-Wing gallery here:
The A-Wing model took a bit more pre-print processing. First, I noticed a small hole in the surface, so I used meshmixer to mirror the better half of the model. Second, the model I had was hollow (there was an internal surface), which would have caused issues later on in combining with joycon holders and printing. The hollow body was simple to rectify—I created a block larger than the A-Wing then used combine to cut the A-Wing from the block. This left several bodies, including one that was the ship model cavity, which was added back into the main ship model. Just as for the Y-Wing model, I imported the Joycon rails, scaled the Awing body, and moved everything in place before combining the bodies.
I’ll admit the joycons on the A-Wing are less than ideal, but I still think it looks cool. 😛
