Mounting your sensor

The next stage of the process is to attach your transducer to something. Typically, I have one mounted into a handle which can slide on and off an object which has an appropriately-shaped mount on it's top surface, and one mounted in a liftoff pad to give information about when liftoff occurs and/or to give rudimentary force measurements for lifting objects which do no have a handle attached to them.

The handle itself consists of 6 parts (assuming you only want to mount a single transducer in it), can be entirely 3d printed: a main body, 2 mounting plates, 2 caps, and one fake transducer (which, obviously, can be substituted for a real transducer).

In the image below, you can see I've had the main body of the handle machined out of aluminium, as this is the section which comes under the most stress when switching objects in and out. This is not a major problem if you are careful - the printed version should suffice. A zip file containing the prints can be downloaded from this page.

The transducer can have stuff attached to it on either side. The back side (with the big wire) is referred to in the diagrams as the 'mounting' side, whereas the front side is referred to as the 'tool' side. Both sides have bolt holes (M2 size) and dowel holes (also 2mm size). I use the bolts holes, as it's easy to get hold of M2 bolts or various lengths.

You can only screw 3.5mm into each side of the transducer - going deeper will damage them. So make sure your caps/mounting plates are thick enough to pick up the slack (i.e., if you order 8.5mm long bolts, you have to be mounting the transducer onto at least a 5mm thick mounting plate. Be particularly careful if you want to use countersunk bolts.

So, first screw each tranducer into to the mounting plate, then connect both mounting plates to the main body using a M2.5 bolt and a nut. Then screw the cap on to each transducer.