Friday 14-Oct-2016, 09:12 AM
WARNING: Electrical Engineers look away now! This won't be pretty...
A few months ago after the 3D printed DC-15s started coming together, I started working on lights and sound for them. I've seen a few impressive lights and sound creations (DC-17M with digital counter, the arduino based E-11, etc) and wanted to give it a crack myself. So I started trying to teach myself arduinos to use as the basis of it. I started just blinking an led and gradually built it one step at a time. I'm onto about the 20th cut of the code since the start and at every update I've had a problem that needed to fixed, overcome or worked-around. What I've got so far is still on the breadboard because I wanted to complete the concept before I start trying to design a permanent fit, shrink it, etc.
Notes:
1. Still working on making the audio louder. Maybe it's the small speaker not helping. I'm going to try and build the amplifier circuit from scratch myself with better chips to improve it. Unfortunately a bigger speaker is hard to pull off with the limited space of a blaster. Two might help, but space Putting the speaker on the end of the barrel makes it louder but I don't know if I will be able to achieve that when it's assembled. Also not yet sure on how to power the amp, i.e.- separate battery or pulled from the arduino.
2. The led bar can be made to count down as if there's 10 shots, 20, 50, whatever you like. I just use 10 so I don't have to press the button 50 times to get to the low power mode when testing.
3. I still need to work out a couple of bugs with one sound cutting another out. I may have to tweak the audio library I'm using to allow simultaneous sounds but I'd rather find a code way around it.
4. Disregard if the lights flash while the magazine wire is removed. It won't be able to do that as it has no power in the magazine alone...... although that would be cool.
5. I was originally going to mount the led bar on the sloped area behind the rear sight but when it arrived it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be and would probably look pretty silly there. So the the led controller chip and led bar will go in the detachable magazine like this (which has created its own power problems, but I have a plan):
6. The voice recordings were made using an online text to speech converter (naturalreader.com). Just ask for Rachel
7. The plan for power is a 7.4 volt rechargeable lipo battery. I'm going to steal one from my son's remote control car to do a test on how long it'll last powering the system. In this regard a separate battery for the amplifier would be better. And 9v on the amp means louder too, but 9 volts are notorious for crappy capacity... and space .
8. The little rumble motor is.... little. I'm planning on using 2 but still not sure how they'll go, but they were the only fully contained ones I could find. They will probably be good for the DC-17 pistols I'll be doing next. I will likely try out one from an x-box controller too but space is the issue and they have an external/exposed weight which spins around to do the vibrating and I'm not sure how that will go inside a blaster with other stuff.
9. Due to my zero starting knowledge and experience I've probably done it the hard way, and from a code and hardware point of view it could probably be done a lot better, but it's not as simple as it looks. Every addition made something that was working stop working.
Personally I'm pretty happy with the overall workings of it. Now I need some feedback on how you think it looks and any changes you'd make to the way it works. Or any ideas to make it better, so I can consider them before I tidy up the code to the final version and start soldering chips into permanent boards for the Mk 1 version.
A short video so you don't have to listen to my voice for long:
A few months ago after the 3D printed DC-15s started coming together, I started working on lights and sound for them. I've seen a few impressive lights and sound creations (DC-17M with digital counter, the arduino based E-11, etc) and wanted to give it a crack myself. So I started trying to teach myself arduinos to use as the basis of it. I started just blinking an led and gradually built it one step at a time. I'm onto about the 20th cut of the code since the start and at every update I've had a problem that needed to fixed, overcome or worked-around. What I've got so far is still on the breadboard because I wanted to complete the concept before I start trying to design a permanent fit, shrink it, etc.
Notes:
1. Still working on making the audio louder. Maybe it's the small speaker not helping. I'm going to try and build the amplifier circuit from scratch myself with better chips to improve it. Unfortunately a bigger speaker is hard to pull off with the limited space of a blaster. Two might help, but space Putting the speaker on the end of the barrel makes it louder but I don't know if I will be able to achieve that when it's assembled. Also not yet sure on how to power the amp, i.e.- separate battery or pulled from the arduino.
2. The led bar can be made to count down as if there's 10 shots, 20, 50, whatever you like. I just use 10 so I don't have to press the button 50 times to get to the low power mode when testing.
3. I still need to work out a couple of bugs with one sound cutting another out. I may have to tweak the audio library I'm using to allow simultaneous sounds but I'd rather find a code way around it.
4. Disregard if the lights flash while the magazine wire is removed. It won't be able to do that as it has no power in the magazine alone...... although that would be cool.
5. I was originally going to mount the led bar on the sloped area behind the rear sight but when it arrived it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be and would probably look pretty silly there. So the the led controller chip and led bar will go in the detachable magazine like this (which has created its own power problems, but I have a plan):
6. The voice recordings were made using an online text to speech converter (naturalreader.com). Just ask for Rachel
7. The plan for power is a 7.4 volt rechargeable lipo battery. I'm going to steal one from my son's remote control car to do a test on how long it'll last powering the system. In this regard a separate battery for the amplifier would be better. And 9v on the amp means louder too, but 9 volts are notorious for crappy capacity... and space .
8. The little rumble motor is.... little. I'm planning on using 2 but still not sure how they'll go, but they were the only fully contained ones I could find. They will probably be good for the DC-17 pistols I'll be doing next. I will likely try out one from an x-box controller too but space is the issue and they have an external/exposed weight which spins around to do the vibrating and I'm not sure how that will go inside a blaster with other stuff.
9. Due to my zero starting knowledge and experience I've probably done it the hard way, and from a code and hardware point of view it could probably be done a lot better, but it's not as simple as it looks. Every addition made something that was working stop working.
Personally I'm pretty happy with the overall workings of it. Now I need some feedback on how you think it looks and any changes you'd make to the way it works. Or any ideas to make it better, so I can consider them before I tidy up the code to the final version and start soldering chips into permanent boards for the Mk 1 version.
A short video so you don't have to listen to my voice for long: