Monday 4 March 2013

Steampunk Firepower–Electronics

I bought some lighting electronic kits from an electronics store that perform some of the lighting jiggery-pokery that I want to put into the Steampunk props, such as the flashing light and chasing lights.

These are not particularly difficult or complex circuits and they fall within the ambit of my level of skill with electronics (i.e. not much).

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The kits were pretty cheap ($7 – $15) and the printed circuit boards are very paint-by-numbers so it wasn’t very hard to build them.

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Here is the chasing lights circuit, the red LED light up left to right and then right to left continuously. In the Steampunk prop, the LED will be mounted around the barrel when the trigger is pulled.

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The flashing light circuit simply oscillates between the green and red LED. In the prototype, the lights will be mounted in the body and be viewed through a bunch of resin ports in the side of the gun.

The next trick is to duplicate the printed circuit in a wired circuit so that I can make sure that I understand the circuit properly. I also need to be able to change the shape of the boards so that they fit into the prototype better and run from a single 9V battery.

I’ve ordered all of the components that I need to be able to build these circuits, and I will make some modifications to the design by including some trimmer potentiometers (so that the frequency of flash and speed of chasing lights can be tuned). I’ll make these on the prototype board first and then transfer the design to a strip-board PCB.

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