Office Chairiot Mark II: Ridiculous Doesn't Even Begin to Describe It

The Office Chairiot Mark II is completely ridiculous, but it is VERY functional. Everything except for the control panel is pretty much off-the-shelf. The joystick can connect directly to the motor controller to do differential steering on its own. Making one of these for someone who could use a tricked out assistive chair is a piece of cake, especially with the resources available at LM!

This thing is nothing more than a chair of your choice, 2 x 12V batteries, a couple of 24V DC scooter motors, some miscellaneous scooter parts, a joystick and a chassis. Easy as pie... -ish.

I'm ALWAYS happy to chat about this thing, so hit me up some time!

Difficult, but not impossible! ;)

Here were the two inspirational images I used when I started dreaming up the control panel:

And...

The other one that gave me the idea for spacing out my switches and buttons was this one:

These panels make me giddy. :p

Those two images are in the folder on my Mac with all of the design files and the scan of the original napkin drawing. That Command Module Main Display Console is gorgeous. I would TOTALLY put that on the Office Chairiot Mark III! Problem would be fitting it through a standard office doorway. :|

Temporary Control Panel Mounting Solution Explained

Hey @jakeferguson (from discussion at Local Motors Projects website), the Apollo control panels were big inspirations for this thing, as a matter of fact! Equal props to the 747 nav panels and such. I would have packed in more switches per inch, but I couldn't come up with enough functions to do that AND I really wanted to avoid having non-function stuff on the panel. I wanted all buttons and switches to do something... Anything! :D

Yeah, the whole panel lifts up and one bracket is short, allowing the whole panel to swing open to the left. It's crude, but it was quick, easy and cheap to fab. Not the best solution and not my original plan, but good for a first try. Here are some shots of it in action-ish:

As you can see, I had to sand/grind off the powdercoat that wasn't supposed to go all the way down the pillars. :( It's cool, though. I would have sanded them a bit to make the fit not-so-snuggly.

Control Panel Post Cleaned.jpg

Above is a close-up of my amateur grinding job.

This is the longer, left-hand side bracket. It's super-simple. Works pretty well. The whole thing doesn't lift up or slide in as smoothly as I'd like, but for prototype purposes, it's good enough.

The right-hand side is shorter. I think I need to shave off another layer and give both pillars another shot of lubricant to make it a little easier to get in and out.

You do have to lean forward a bit to get at the controls, which I noticed I did anyway when driving it, so that doesn't seem to be too big a deal. The design issues I have to work around mostly relate to operator leg room. The pillars are a little too long, at the moment, because I wasn't quite sure during the design phase how long I would need them to be, so I had the fab guys just make them "this" long. I wanted to be sure the whole thing was roomy enough for your legs. I can chop the ends of the pillars off as needed.

I have a number of cooler ideas for getting in and out of the chair quickly and making the panel swing away easily. I'm hoping at the labs there we can fab a better mounting system and retrofit the panel to it.

Also, also, the chair, as you know, is very comfy, but it isn't really conducive to this nutty of a control panel unless the panel is mounted up in front of your face. :) That would be funny, but not safe or practical (like this whole thing has more than a few ounces of practicality).

We're getting sooooo close to you guys getting to test drive it!

More Test Fitting the Control Panel

The control panel is now mounted to the front of the chair! It doesn't control everything, yet, but it's close!

The original design I proposed to the fab guy would probably be a better design, after all was said and done. The weight of the panel enclosure with all of the controls and parts on and in it is enough that one pillar is pushing it when it swings away so the driver can get in and out of the chair. But, for a first version, it's not bad at all.

Plenty of leg room. The LCD still needs to be mounted into its spot, but that's not necessary to drive the thing. :)

The stick is a bit of a reach. The fabrication of the pillars, mounts and enclosure was a good deal, so I'm not complaining. But, I'd like to built better mounting for it and design the mounts in a way that makes the panel swing away way more slickly.

That and the chassis redesign will happen at LM, for sure. Just need to get it drivable so you all can feel what it's like to truly cruise around the office.

New Mac Pro and Backup Sensors!

I got a little distracted over the past few days... WITH MY NEW MAC PRO!!

Now the CAD and graphics and stuff is faster.

Last week the backup sensor kit came in. I'll hack that to work with the "Safety" quadrant of the control panel.

It's basically a cheap Chinese kit I found on Amazon. The display for it is just LEDs and a little double-digit 7-segment display. I'll bust open that part and tie into the LEDs to drive the ones on the Office Chairiot's control panel.

I'm still defining the throttle curves. Hopefully I'll have the safe and not-safe data loaded on the controller this weekend. The Chairiot should be drivable at that point. WOOT!

Glossy Plastic Face for Control Panel

Good news on the control panel graphics: The black glossy plastic I had cut as a possible front panel overlaid precisely onto the enclosure and turned out to look damn sexy! What do you know? Laser cutters and water jets and the like are pretty dead accurate!

Glossy is what I had hoped for in the powder coat, but it was FREE-ninety-free, so you get what you can. Here's a closer look:

The Thrust and the Indicators quadrants are still bare powder coated, but those stickers stayed pretty well stuck.

Still getting the throttle firmware shored up. This weekend I will be mounting the panel to the front of the chair. After that, it should be ready to roll, even if without the special effects.

I tried so hard to get it to a drivable state for the August Open House, but so many other unrelated things caused delays. It's so close to being back to ready to drive. Keeping fingers crossed for this weekend.