Overview of the Build

Overview of the Build

This page is a map of the nine build stages — what each one actually involves, why they run in this order, and where the points of no return are. Read it before you order anything; the individual Part pages cover the how, this page covers the shape of the whole project.

No soldering

The PCB arrives fully assembled from JLCPCB — every component on it, including the microcontroller, the five haptic drivers, and all the connectors, is placed and soldered by the fab. You never solder anything to the board itself. The tactor's wire-to-LRA connection is a friction contact made by a printed wire plug (see Part 4 LRA Housing Assembly), not a solder joint — so there is no soldering anywhere in this build. If soldering is what's been holding you back from starting, there's none to do.

The nine stages

Parts and Tools List is the shopping list, not a build stage, but read it alongside Part 1 Ordering the PCB before you order anything — between the two of them you'll know the full cost picture and that board fabrication is the long pole in the schedule.

1. Part 1 Ordering the PCB — Order two assembled boards from JLCPCB using the gerbers, BOM, and CPL files in the repo. This is the only step with real manufacturing lead time: the fab has to source parts, place them, and ship. You come out of this step holding two fully populated PCBs and nothing else — no LRAs, no gloves, no battery.

2. Part 2 Flashing and Smoke Testing the Bare Board — Flash both boards with the BlueBuzzah Updater, fit the required BLE antenna to each board, assign one PRIMARY and one SECONDARY role, and buzz-test all ten motor ports (five per board) by holding a loose LRA against each one and tapping the matching button in BuzzahBuddy's Calibration screen. You come out of this step with two boards proven to flash, pair, and drive every channel — before either one has a single tactor permanently attached.

3. Part 3 Building the Tactors — Prepare ten tactor wire leads: strip the ends and crimp a 2-pin JST-PH connector onto each. There's no soldering; the wire-to-LRA connection is made later by the printed wire plug in Part 4, which is also where each tactor is buzz-tested before it's housed. You come out of this step with ten JST leads and ten LRAs, ready for housing assembly.

4. Part 4 LRA Housing Assembly — 3D-print the seven-piece housing set for each tactor — sled, wire plug, shell, lid, pin, finger cup, and finger support — and assemble it around each LRA and its wire lead, together with three separately-sourced compression springs per housing (see Parts and Tools List). Seating the wire plug (Step 2) is what connects the wire to the LRA, and a buzz-check runs just before the shell's final dovetail joint is closed — see below. You come out of this step with ten fully housed, spring-mounted tactors.

5. Part 5 Mounting Tactors in Glove Fingertips — Cut a fingertip hole in each of two nitrile-dipped gloves and mount a housed tactor in each, five per glove. This is also where you commit to which glove is left and which is right, and record which role-assigned board goes with which hand. You come out of this step with two gloves, each carrying five mounted tactors with wires routed loosely toward the wrist.

6. Part 6 Wiring the Glove Harness — Connect each fingertip's tactor to the correct motor port on that glove's board, using the canonical finger-to-port table (the silk-screened port numbers run backwards relative to the firmware's finger assignments). Verify every channel by finger name in BuzzahBuddy's Calibration screen before dressing the wires down permanently. You come out of this step with a fully wired, strain-relieved glove per hand, each individually verified finger-by-finger.

7. Part 7 Enclosure and Mounting — Not yet possible; see below.

8. Part 8 First Power On and Full Bench Test — With both gloves wired, power both boards together and run the full per-finger test on both, confirm BuzzahBuddy reports a healthy battery level for both, and confirm the two boards find each other and turn solid green. You come out of this step with a fully verified pair of glove electronics — bench-proven, not yet wearable.

9. Part 9 Using the Gloves — Install BuzzahBuddy, connect it to the gloves, confirm the PRIMARY/SECONDARY roles line up with the handedness you committed to in Part 5, and run a session on the bench. This is where a handedness or role mismatch — invisible through every prior step — finally becomes visible, and it's fixable in software without rebuilding anything.

Why testing comes before assembly, not after

Every board is flashed and every one of its five motor channels is proven to buzz in Part 2 — before any tactor is assembled, before any housing is closed, and before any glove is cut. That's a deliberate inversion of how a build like this might normally go. It exists so that a dead board or a bad haptic driver is found while it costs nothing to find: a bare board with no tactor on it, no housing sealed, no glove cut. Finding the same fault after five stages of irreversible assembly — in Part 8, say — would mean reopening a latched housing, or worse. The build pays for that insurance up front, once, on two bare boards, rather than risking it at the end on two finished gloves.

What can't be undone, and what guards it

Three steps in this build are difficult or impossible to reverse. Each one is deliberately preceded by a verification step that catches the fault it would otherwise lock in:

• Part 4 — closing the dovetailed housing. The shell's latching tab is easy to break and hard to reopen safely once seated. The wire-to-LRA connection is made just before this, when the wire plug seats (Part 4, Step 2), and a buzz-check against a verified board runs immediately before the shell is closed — so a bad LRA or a poorly seated wire is never sealed inside plastic.
• Part 5 — cutting glove fingertips. A cut hole can't be uncut, and this is also where left/right handedness gets committed — which glove is which hand, and which role-assigned board goes with which glove. Get this wrong and it doesn't show up as a failure anywhere in the build; it only surfaces once therapy runs on the wrong hand in Part 9.
• Part 6 — dressing and securing the harness. Because the PCB's silk-screened port numbers run backwards relative to the firmware's finger assignments, a wiring mistake here is not obviously broken — every port has a tactor, every tactor buzzes, the board passes its test, and the glove still silently delivers therapy to the wrong finger. Each of the five channels is verified by finger name in BuzzahBuddy before the wires are dressed down permanently.

That pairing — verify, then commit — is the guide's core design. It shows up again in Part 8, which retests every channel on the fully assembled pair specifically to catch a harness transposition that Part 6's per-glove check could have missed.

What's waiting on shipping versus what's on the bench

Part 1 is the only step with outside lead time you can't shortcut — the assembled boards have to be fabricated and shipped before anything else in the build can start, which is why it's first. Everything else in Parts 2 through 6 depends only on things you can source or produce yourself: LRAs and JST connectors need ordering, housings need 3D printing, gloves need sourcing, and batteries need to arrive — but none of that has the same fabrication queue that PCB assembly does. Once the boards are in hand, the rest of the build is gated by your own sourcing and prep, not by a manufacturer's schedule.

Where the path currently ends

Important

In design. The v3 enclosure has not been designed yet. You can build, wire, flash, and bench-test a complete pair of gloves, but you cannot yet mount them on a glove for daily wear. No substitute enclosure is recommended.

Part 7 doesn't have build instructions because there's nothing to build yet — no v3 enclosure design exists. Parts 8 and 9 still work today with the boards sitting loose next to the gloves rather than mounted on them, so you can reach a fully bench-tested, BuzzahBuddy-paired set of glove electronics by following this guide start to finish. What you can't do yet is wear them. See Build Status for the current state of that gap.

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