The Dilder Gets a Speaker, a Motion Sensor, and a Better Joystick
Today's build session gave the Dilder three new tricks: it can make noise, sense when you tilt it, and the joystick finally sits exactly where it should. Here's what changed and why.
Hardware¶
A snap-on thumbpiece for the joystick — designing a tiny part by talking to the CAD
The K1-1506SN-01 5-way switch on the joystick PCB has a bare 3.2 × 3.2 mm rectangular peg sticking up through the cover. Pressing it directly works, but it's small, sharp at the corners, and the peg sticks up into the cover's 12 mm circle cutout where it looks half-finished. I wanted a printable snap cap — concave for the thumb, sized to vanish into the cutout, and tight enough on the peg to stay put without glue.
Pico 2 W in the FreeCAD Assembly — STEP Import, Procedural Headers, Z-Flip Mount
The Rev 2 Mk2 enclosure was already a parametric three-body FreeCAD model (base plate, AAA cradle, top cover). What it was missing was the actual electronics. This pass adds the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W board — imported from the official STEP file — plus a procedural 2×20 pin-header rail, mounted upside-down inside the cradle's PicoNest cavity with its component-side face flush against the cradle mating plane.
OpenSCAD to FreeCAD — Full Parametric Enclosure in PartDesign
Translated the entire Dilder Rev 2 three-part enclosure from OpenSCAD into a proper FreeCAD PartDesign model with an editable feature tree and spreadsheet-driven parameters.
Joystick PCB Sent to JLCPCB — First Custom Board in Production
The hand-routed joystick breakout PCB is now in production at JLCPCB. This is the first custom PCB for the Dilder project — a 19.6 x 19.6 mm board carrying a K1-1506SN-01 5-way navigation switch that drops into the top cover's joystick pocket.
Hand-Routed Joystick Breakout PCB — First Board From Scratch
Designed my first PCB from scratch in KiCad 10 — a hand-routed joystick breakout board for the Dilder's K1-1506SN-01 5-way navigation switch. No autorouter this time, just manual trace placement, silkscreen labels, and a ground plane. The board fits the 20x20mm pocket already milled into the Rev 2 top cover.
Joystick Breakout PCB Rev 2.0 — Real Footprint, Real Pinout, Real Autoroute
Yesterday's joystick breakout PCB shipped with three quietly serious bugs: a hand-drawn switch footprint with the wrong pad geometry, a wire pad that physically overlapped a mounting hole, and a pinout I'd half-invented because I hadn't read the Alps datasheet diagram. Rev 2.0 fixes all three by stealing real reference designs and runs the full autorouter pipeline headless from the CLI.
Pico 2 W Board Support + Current Design Photos
Added the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (RP2350) as a third target board alongside the original Pico W and ESP32-S3. The Pico 2 W is now the default development board for Dilder. Also captured photos of the current Rev 2 build running Sassy Octopus.
Rev 2 v3 Print Session — Assembly Photos and Next Steps
Overnight print of the latest base plate v3 (with support blocks and raised battery rails), updated cradle insert, and top cover. All three parts fit-checked with the Pico 2 W, TP4056 charge board, Ansmann AAA Li-Ion batteries, and Waveshare 2.13" e-ink display. Also pictured: a small solar panel being evaluated for future charging.
AAA Cradle Insert + Base Plate — Splitting the Stack into Three Parts
Up to this point the Rev 2 stack has been either three pieces (base + middle-platform + top-cover) or two pieces (base-v3-2piece + top-cover). This session adds a fourth design path: a drop-in AAA cradle that lives in the cover's negative space, plus a shallow base plate that snaps into the cover via four corner pegs. The middle platform goes away entirely; what was carried by the base now gets carried by the cradle insert and the base plate together.