Rotary Dial mechanism

thingiverse

Inspired by a phone case from Shapeways, which is printed as one piece and truly remarkable. Yet SLS printing can be quite pricey, so I designed one that snaps together from multiple parts, each featuring a large flat base for effortless printing on a desktop FDM machine. The design boasts a spiral spring and slotted disk tailored specifically for a rotary encoder at the back, allowing seamless interfacing with an Arduino. (I will soon post a video of it being dialed and connected to an Arduino.) A Fusion 360 file is included, containing equations that assist in setting the spring outer diameter since Fusion only accepts pitch and inner diam as arguments when generating spirals. All favored parameters are user-input variables. If you're unfamiliar with parameters in Fusion, they're incredibly useful; check out Hackaday's tutorial on making parametric models in Fusion 360 for a better understanding. In the fourth image, you can see the four iterations of the design I went through before achieving perfection.