Dragon 32 Joystick Adapter

thingiverse

I recently purchased a Dragon 32 off of Ebay, in desperate need of some love and attention. A few tweaks here and there, much head scratching and after I got it working I even retrobrited it… restoring it to its former 1982 glory! This project supplied me with all the geekery goodness I could ask for; retro gaming, electronics, 3D printing and restoring a classic computer from the past! The computer came with no cables so I made up my own data and video cable; after a wee bit of research, I found that the Dragon 32’s joysticks were of the analog type (and pretty rubbish by the reviews I read) So I decided to look into a way of converting it to digital (such as the best joystick ever made… the Atari 2600 joystick) and I stumbled across this site http://vrai.net/retro/?p=112 Here was my solution; design a circuit board and 3D print the enclosure! The circuit design was pretty straightforward; I teach electronics, so I thought that I would try new techniques with the enclosure. I wanted to include the Dragon Data logo as well as information about what was in the box, using an SLA printer meant that printing in different colours was out of the question. My solution was simple, extrude a cut (0.5mm in this case) with the logo and text, then use acrylic paint and a plastic squeegee to spread the paint into the extruded cut. This in theory should scrap away most of the excess paint and I thought that using isopropanol would wipe away what was left. Unfortunately, this did not work quite as expected and as I used white resin to print with (with the hope that it will discolour to the same shade as the Dragon) I ended up with a pretty stained 3D print. Thinking outside the box ;) I decided to use a foam sanding block and I am pretty happy with the result. The colours of the DRAGON 32 text isn’t quite what I expected but with practice I am sure I will get better! Next up is a thumbpad analog joystick for the Dragon 32...