New Workspace

Now that I have thoroughly moved in to our new house, I have been busy setting up my hobby workspace.

My office/workspace is a 3m x 3m room with a good sized window for natural light. I have set up a table in my office for my hobbies (mostly electronics)

The first thing that I did was to make a pegboard that I could hang my tools on - so that they were within easy reach and easily seen.

Then, I mounted my small components drawers onto the wall facing my workbench. Jaycar have discontinued these cabinets, so it was a bit of a pain to get the last two. There are six of them, each with 32 small component drawers and one large drawer. That gives me 192 small drawers and six large drawers. These drawers contain my through hole components, blank PCB, breadboards and some other bits and bobs.

You’ll notice that there is a binocular microscope on the bench, my darling wife (an entomologist) gave me her old ento-scope for soldering small components.

I have a couple of pencil cups on my workbench with pens and pencils as well as a collection of Staedtler Lumo Colour and Sharpie markers (for fixing PCB laser transfers).

My solid core wire, stranded wire and solder are all in easy reach too.

 

The workbench is a fold-up table that we bought some time ago. The LED magnifying lamp is mounted on the end of the workbench so that I can swing it into place whenever I need it. I’m using an old office chair for comfortable seating … it’s pretty sweet.

I mounted the drawers on the wall with a gap underneath for other miscellaneous tools and project parts. The hobby/cutting mat on the peg-board is usually on the workbench when I’m working so that I don’t make a mess of the workbench and to make cleaning up easier.

Right beside my workbench I have a couple of bookshelves for books and other larger components. On the white bookshelves (on the third shelf down) I have my collection of SMD components. I bought a mixed collection of 0805 capacitors and resistors some time back, so that I could practice and learn soldering of these tiny components. I have the components in a bunch of fishing tackle boxes that I bought from K-Mart ($2.50 each). I made the timber bookshelf last weekend. I was hunting for a bookshelf that fitted in the space between the white bookshelf and the door, I couldn’t find one the right size, so I bought some pine and made it myself … I’m pretty happy with how that turned out.

Anyway, that’s my new electronics workspace. I’ve tried to organise the tools and consumables as efficiently as possible, making sure the things that I use most often are most available.

I am, however, moving the PCB manufacturing tasks out to my workshop in the back yard. Mostly so that I can keep things like Hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide out of harms way, it also means that the fumes from acid etching don’t stink up our house.

Now all I need to do is to work out what my next project is going to be … I’ve been thinking about making an SMD version of my 9V to 5V Voltage Regulator circuit.

Arduino UNO Tutorial Lessons – 1 to 3

OK, so I’ve gone through the first three tutorials and had a bit of a play with the UNO. It’s pretty easy for the first three lessons … and I anticipate that the remaining lessons will be similarly easy.

Lesson 1 – Blink..

Here we are hooking up the UNO to a 470 ohm resistor and LED and passing HIGH/LOW instructions to pin 13 through native functional loop.

/*
  Blink
  Turns on an LED on for one second, then off for one second, repeatedly.
  This example code is in the public domain.
*/
 
// Pin 13 has an LED connected on most Arduino boards.
// give it a name:
int led = 13;

// the setup routine runs once when you press reset:
void setup() {               
  // initialize the digital pin as an output.
  pinMode(led, OUTPUT);    
}

// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:
void loop() {
  digitalWrite(led, HIGH);   // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
  delay(1500);               // wait for a second
  digitalWrite(led, LOW);    // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
  delay(1500);               // wait for a second
}

The code is pretty simple. Initialise the variable “led” as an integer and assign the value 13. This is the pin-out on the UNO that we connect the LED to.

setup then sets the pinMode of led (13) to be OUTPUT … that is, to receive signals.

The loop function sends a HIGH instruction to pin 13, waits 1500 milliseconds (1 and a half seconds) and then sends a LOW instruction to pin 13, waits another 1500 milliseconds and repeats.

Lesson 2 – Light Chaser

The breadboard is populated with 8 LED and 8 470 ohm resistors. The LED are connected to pins 6 through to 13 on the UNO and the ground rail of the breadboard is connected to the GND pin of the UNO.

The sketch simply creates an array containing the pin locations of each of the LED to be turned on and off in sequence within a for loop. Initially, the array contains each LED once and two for loops drive the sequence, one incrementing the pin, the second decrementing the pin.

The final version of the sketch has the array containing the entire increment/decrement sequence and a single for loop that does the driving.

int ledCount = 15;
int ledPins[] = {6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7};
int ledDelay = 75;

void setup() {
  for(int thisLed = 0; thisLed < ledCount; thisLed++){
    pinMode(ledPins[thisLed], OUTPUT);
  }
}

void loop() {
  for (int thisLed = 0; thisLed < ledCount; thisLed++){
    digitalWrite(ledPins[thisLed], HIGH);
    delay(ledDelay);
    digitalWrite(ledPins[thisLed],LOW);
  }
  /*
  for (int thisLed = ledCount-1; thisLed > 0; thisLed--){
    digitalWrite(ledPins[thisLed], HIGH);
    delay(ledDelay);
    digitalWrite(ledPins[thisLed],LOW);
  }*/
}

Lesson 3 – Momentary Switch

Lesson 3 adds a momentary switch with a 10k ohm resistor into the breadboard and some instructions in the sketch to handle the button press.

int ledCount = 14;
int ledPins[] = {6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7};
int ledDelay = 75;
int buttonPin = 2;

void setup() {
  for(int thisLed = 0; thisLed < ledCount; thisLed++){
    pinMode(ledPins[thisLed], OUTPUT);
  }
  pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
}

void loop() {
  for (int thisLed = 0; thisLed < ledCount; thisLed++){
    digitalWrite(ledPins[thisLed], HIGH);
    while(digitalRead(buttonPin) == HIGH) {
      delay(10);
    }
    delay(ledDelay);
    digitalWrite(ledPins[thisLed],LOW);
  }
  /*
  for (int thisLed = ledCount-1; thisLed > 0; thisLed--){
    digitalWrite(ledPins[thisLed], HIGH);
    delay(ledDelay);
    digitalWrite(ledPins[thisLed],LOW);
  }*/
}

Arduino Uno Clone – Freetronics 11

I have gone out and bought myself a Freetronics 11 kit from Jaycar (for the princely sum of just shy of $90AUD). I realise that this is a fairly high price for the Arduino with  a couple of peripherals, but I wanted to get something from a bricks and mortar store where I could get some support if needed. I’ve also just bought another clone from eBay for $10 with no peripheral bits and pieces … so I figure that I’m still doing OK.

The offering from Jaycar comes with some digital and analog input devices, some LED, diodes, resistors and jumper wires (and a little solderless breadboard) all of which I could have bought individually for much less … but there you go.

The first adventure was getting the device to be recognised on my 64 bit WIndows Home Premium machine. That was a little tedious, but when I downloaded the updated USB driver from Freetronics, I was up and running.

As the chip comes pre-loaded with the blink sketch, I made some small modifications, compiled and uploaded to the UNO and, presto … it worked.

Now, I’m reasonably familiar with programming, although I don’t have much experience with C++, but the structures and operators are all fairly consistent with what I know. I’m going to jump right in and do all of the tutorial builds to give me a refresher and some added experience with the UNO.

By the way, from here on, I’m going to refer to the development board as “the UNO” for simplicity sake. I’m not going to make any distinction between the “eleven”, the clone from top_electronics_au or any later clone purchases. The platform is open source … so I’m going to use the generic name.

There are a host of sites that offer, more or less, the same tutorials. When I post my results and comments about any of the tutorial projects, I’ll try to give a link to the tutorial where it is relevant.

As I mentioned in the previous article about my thinking and research into the UNO, there seem to be two schools of though about the application of the development board. On the one hand, there is the “build it on the development board and deploy it on the development board” camp and the “develop on the development board and deploy it on your own circuit” (I favour the latter camp, personally, but I don’t think that there is much value in arguing either side … so I wont. Do what you want! Me, I like the idea of building a circuit that is purpose made without any redundancy … but that also means that what I build won’t necessarily be extensible.

On with the show!

Moved House … again

Well, I’ve moved and I my new digs are not too big. I am now living about 760 km from my workshop, so there isn’t going to be any major work going on. I hope you all had a restful break.

I’ve been toying with making stuff for a while now and it’s time to explore another path to the goal of making steam-punk paraphernalia. This next path is going to be going back to basics.

I am going to start modelling some stuff using plasticine and then investing it in silicone so that I can make some resin prototypes. That doesn’t sounds very hard, does it?

I bought a 500g block of grey plasticine from the art store (Artery, 137 Collins St Hobart) for the princely sum of $5.55. The plasticine is Non-Toxic Belgrave Quality Modelling Clay. Now, the last time that I played with plasticine was when I was in Primary school, some time around 1976. I have some clay modelling tools (spatulas and some loop tools). I also have some Isocol rubbing alcohol, apparently this is used as a lubricant for plasticine and also for smoothing the surface.

I plan to start simply so that I can gain some skills in clay modelling/sculpting. There are a couple of things that I could start with, but what I’d like to do is to make a BeetleBot (V2). The first time that I saw this robot was on the Instructables website (by Jerome Demers). The BeetleBot is basically a pair of DC Motors, a pair of lever SPDT switches and a battery holder. The antennae of the BeetleBot are attached to the SPDT switches; when the beetle antenna hit something, it temporarily switches the off-side motor into reverse, making the BeetleBot move away from what it just hit. I’m going to add a toggle switch so that the BeetleBot can be turned off and on. There’s another guide to this simple robot that can be found on the Science Museum Learning website.

The modelling side of this project is simply to make a covering for the BeetleBot so the plasticine will be used to make the basic shape of the BeetleBot body …

Anyway … that’s going to be my first project in the new flat. Check out the links to the BeetleBot instructions and have a go yourself!

Steampunk Electronics–LED Goggles

I’ve had an idea for embedding 12 LED into a ring structure that will fit into goggles.

The idea is fairly straight forward, 12 x LED, 12 x 100Ω resistors on a PCB ring with a power supply. I want to make the LED array into a single solid unit.

The LED will be arranged in parallel, that is, all of the anodes will be connected to the positive side of the battery and all of the cathodes will be connected to a 100Ω resistor and each of the 12 100Ω resistors will connect to the negative (ground) side of the battery. Also, the LED and resistors will be arranged around a PCB that has been cut into a ring shape.

The battery leads and  the resistors will be soldered onto the bottom of the PCB so that only the PCB and LED will be visible from the “top” of the board.

I will make a silicone mold that will embed the LED side of the project and this will be filled with a clear or slightly opaque resin. The other side of the project will be filled with a black resin (so that the light from the LED doesn’t come back into the eyes).

I’m going to need to make the PCB layout a bit more elegant and the LED equidistant so that it doesn’t look too crappy.

I want to make the LED ring sit inside of the ocular tube of the goggles so that they cast a bright light where the goggles are facing.

12 LED should drain a 9 volt battery fairly quickly, so I don’t expect that this will be a suitable torch, so I’m going with colour instead.

The battery leads will come out on the under side so that they can be attached to the inside of the goggles. I’m going to make a battery clip /pocket out of leather that will attach to the back of the goggles strap. But, first things first. Make the prototype, then make the molds, then see how the LED like being in resin.

The goggles will be another article much later. First I’ll be making the LED ring.

Steampunk Electronics–Heartbeat Part 4

The Home Made PCB

Today I made my first home made printed circuit board. The challenge was to design the and etch a circuit board.
I decided to use the Hydrochloric acid and Hydrogen Peroxide etchant.
I had previously designed the circuit using Fritzing and then printed it out on plain 80gsm copy paper. I had heard that this wasn’t ideal, but what the hell … we are just prototyping, so whatever.
I used the iron on Linen (the hottest setting for our iron) and pressed the design onto the copper clad board. Next, I bathed the copper clad board in water to get the paper off.
Things looked pretty OK at this stage, the print transfer was not too bad, I could see some pitting under the magnifying glass. But … let’s see how it goes. I decided to use my Sharpie pen to improve the lines somewhat.
I made the etchant from 1 part Hydrochloric acid mixed with 2 parts Hydrogen Peroxide. I bought a 200ml bottle of 3% Hydrogen Peroxide from the chemists and a 500ml bottle of Hydrochloric acid from the hardware store. I also bought some Isopropyl alcohol and some nail polish remover so that I could clean the board once it had been bathed.
Before doing anything, I got some glasses on and put on my heavy duty rubber gloves. I also prepared my work surface, putting down a 1m x 80cm plastic mat to protect the table.
I poured the 200ml of peroxide into a clean and empty orange juice bottle and then measured out 100ml of acid and poured it into the bottle and gently agitated it.
Next, I poured a small amount (about 100ml) of the solution into a smaller plastic container and then I put the copper clad board into the solution … then I waited.
About 10 minutes later, I had a nice looking board with all of the copper dissolved away, leaving the black laser toner and Sharpie ink.
I took a tissue and rubbed the toner and ink off the board and then gave it the once over with the rubbing alcohol to be sure.
The result was quite reasonable … it still looked a little pitted in places, but testing the board with my multimeter showed that the traces were not broken. I used the multimeter in continuity mode.
Then, I got out the components to solder to the board, the soldering iron and the solder and fixed the components onto the board.


Sorry about the poor quality of the pictures.
Then I powered it up and got … nothing.
The step that I missed, the step that I should not have missed, the thing that I failed to do in my impatience to go from design to circuit board was … relaying out the prototype board with the changed design. Now I need to go back to the drawing board and do it all over. Still, that’s not that much of a problem, it is fun and it’s a learning experience.

Steampunk Electronics–Heartbeat Part 3

Well now … I have duplicated the circuit that Charles Platt shows in his book.

The circuit makes use of direct component soldering rather than using jumper wires or using routes from a printed circuit board.

The resulting circuit works fairly well, although I believe that the capacitors are shorting somewhere in the circuit as the LED does not pulse as the prototype board version did, rather, it pulses on and flashes off. When the power is removed from the circuit, the LED powers down completely, without any capacitor leaking.

Anyway, this is a prototype and I am working on that basis.

As you can see from the picture, the circuit is very small.

You  can see from  the under side, that the legs from each component is used to connect to the next component(s) in the circuit.

I am using some very cheap circuit boards that I bought from eBay. I neglected to clean the board first, so the soldering job wasn’t all that successful (part of the reason that I think that there is a soldering fault). However, as the components are directly soldered, the perf board is used merely as a strata for the circuit.

And here it is.

I need to make a printed circuit board next to improve and refine the prototype.

Steampunk Electronics–Heartbeat Part 2

In the first article, I was talking about using the Charles Platt design for creating a pulsing LED using a 2N6027 PUT, a couple of resistors, a couple of capacitors and an LED.

Today, I took the schematic from Make: Electronics (by Charles Platt) and built it on a prototype board.

The first thing that I did was to transfer the resistors from the schematic onto the prototype board. It’s a simple design with not many components, so I decided to have the resistors spanning the separation channel in the middle, and then use jumper wires to connect them all.

Next, I put the capacitors  in place along with the transistor and the LED.

Finally, I jumped the components so that they were connected according to the schematic.

I connected the battery (9V) to the board and waited … and waited. There was something wrong.

I needed to get out the multimeter and work out what was wrong.

I tested the battery … it was measuring 8.94V so that wasn’t the problem. Next I tested continuity on all of the jumpers … they were working fine.

Test the resistors, also OK. Interestingly, the resisters that I bought from eBay … all within the stated tolerance, so, Yay.

Test the capacitors … also fine.

I tested the LED and it was also peachy keen … so what had I done wrong?

I noticed that the prototype board power rails had a break in the middle and that I needed to jump between the gaps (d’oh!) I should have realised that this was the case, but then, this is the first time that I’ve used the prototype board in earnest.

After putting in the jumpers, I powered it up and … presto! it works just like is says on the box.

I’ve colour coded the jumpers so that I know what is going where.

White jumpers connect to a resistor, Green jumpers connect to a capacitor, Blue jumpers connect to the transistor, Yellow jumpers connect to the LED. Black and Red are Negative and Positive power respectively.

I’ve just been playing with the circuit a bit and I’ve decided that the timing for the LED was wrong. The LED flashed too quickly for my taste with a cycle of on-off in about 1 second. I’ve replaced the capacitors in the circuit. Now the capacitors are:

C1 – 220 µF electrolytic capacitor; and

C2 – 470 µF electrolytic capacitor.

The on-off cycle is now about 2.5 seconds and much more pleasing for me.

Next, I’m going to transfer this to a perf board and put it in a project box. I think that this will work well for the Steam Punk prop. The prototype perf board will be larger than the one that I will use with a PCB, simply so that I have space to wire it. I will be using a standard copper padded perf board and the holes are all pre-drilled, so there won’t be much opportunity to compress the design. Also, because I will be using wire between the components rather than copper route, I will need some extra space for soldering and general jiggery pokery.

Anyway … it’s time to go and play with perf board and project boxes.

Steampunk Electronics–Heartbeat

I’ve been playing around with making a pulsing LED that I will use in the body of the Steampunk gun. The LED will be mounted in the back of the gun and I will make a resin shell that will go around it … kinda like a dome on the back of the gun.

The circuit is basically a series of resisters, a couple of capacitors and a 2n6027 PUT (programmable unijunction transistor). The arrangement of resisters and capacitors shape the voltage through the circuit so that the first capacitor takes a short while to charge up, and then leak out. The result should be a gradual increase in the light emitted from the LED and then a slower decrease in the light.

I’ve seen some circuits on the interweb that use a 555 timer IC (integrated circuit) to do the switching from on to off, but this one from Charles Platt (Make: Electronics) is much more straight forward and should do what I need it to do. Plus … this circuit is cheaper than a circuit using a 555 timer.

I’m using a pin header for both the power connection as well as the leads for the LED so that I can have the LED on a flexible connection. I’m fitting the connecting wires with 2 pin DuPont female connectors so that I can easily connect the battery (9v) and the LED.

Parts:

• C1 – 100 µF electrolytic capacitor;
• C2 – 220 µF electrolytic capacitor;
• J1 – Generic female header – 4 pins;
• LED1 – pick whichever you like … I’m going to use a 5mm white ultra-bright 20000mcd that I picked up on eBay from (vendor bobpwaytoway);
• Q1 – PUT Transistor 2N6027;
• R1 – 33k Ω 1/4W 250V Through Hole Carbon Film Resistor;
• R2, R3, R4 – 1k Ω 1/4W Metal Film Resistors;
• R5 – 330 Ω 1/4 W Metal Film Resistor;
• VCC1 – 9V battery block;
• FR7 single sided copper clad board.

After jiggering around with the circuit for a while using Fritzing, the above PCB is the design that I’m most happy with.

The top two pin of J1 are connected to the battery. The bottom two are the LED.

I’m going to mount the LED in a ping-pong ball so that the light is more diffuse.

I’ll prototype the board this weekend and post any updates and photographs.

You can see that this is a very simple and small circuit, so it won’t take long to prototype or solder. I’ll make an intermediate prototype using perf-board so that I can see how the rats nest works out for me. The board is about 4.5 x 3 cm so the size should suit my needs too.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Steampunk Firepower–Prototype Encased

Well, I think that I have given the prototype gun enough coating to make it sturdy enough.

There are some small bits that still need touching up due to the fact that I can’t give it an all-over coat at once, but have to build the coat up in stages (I have to hold it somewhere while I apply the filler). But, overall, I’ve given the prototype 5 coats of filler. There are also some coats of 2 part epoxy and paint under the filler, but I’m not counting them.

The last couple of coats have been very thin so that the finished surface is as smooth as I can make it. I’ve rubbed the prototype with 120 grit sandpaper between coats to knock off some of the grainy bits in the filler and to smooth out some streaks left by the paintbrush.

You can see the overall shape of the prototype now too. Large body, thick barrel, chunky pistol grip, wavy bottom of the body and flat top.

Next I’m going to be drawing the design onto the prototype to mark out all of the areas that I’m going to etch with the Dremmel rotary tool and the cut-line where I’m going to cut the prototype in half.

Etching the surface is going to be another experimental stage. I know that the directions for the filler say that it can be drilled, sawn and sanded, but the subsurface has a lot of give and the vibration from the rotary tool may cause the filler to lift from the prototype. If it does, I’m going to go over the whole thing with a clear acrylic paint to help to stabilise it.

When the etching is done, I will be moving on to the next stage … making the prototype ready for investing. That’ll involve cutting it in half, removing the polystyrene core using acetone, building up the interior surface with more filler (so that the shell is at least 5mm thick), and of course … fixing anything that goes contrariwise to me.

So far … so good.

I’ve now ordered a truckload of electronic components from eBay (resistors, transistors, capacitors, timer IC, decade counter IC, LED, potentiometers, PCB, e.t.c) so that I can do some more work on the prototype electronic gubbins. I want to have a pulsing LED glowing through some cut-outs in the body and some lights chasing around the barrel of the gun. Here is a crap visualisation of the lights.

The cut-outs will be covered with some inset resin panels and will have a single large LED with a pulse circuit while the chasing lights will be some 3mm LED. Chasing just means that each light comes on in sequence (kinda like the “eye” of a Cylon). The above picture is pretty bad … just something I knocked up in MS-PAINT in a couple of seconds.

The body will not be that colour when it is in the final material, so don’t worry about that!

I want the circuitry to be fairly simple and I’m going to use trim pot resistors so that the cycle time can be varied manually.

Steampunk Firepower–More Prototyping

Today I bought some water based multipurpose filler … Agnew’s Water Filler. This is a great filler and works on lots of different materials, but, importantly, it works on polystyrene.

The filler mixes 3 parts powder to 1 part water to make a thick paste. I made a mix of 1 to 1 to make a thin slurry of the putty and applied it directly to the polystyrene with an artist paintbrush. So far, I have applied 3 layers and it takes about 10 minutes for the putty to dry sufficiently to apply another layer. So that’s about 30 minutes to get about 2.5mm thick coverage over the polystyrene.

The putty can be sawn, sanded, drilled and carved, so I’m pretty pleased with the scope for the putty as a modelling medium.

I needed to extend the grip on the gun as it was about a finger too short. To do this, I used a hacksaw to cut the end of the original handle off and then carved a 1” polystyrene block and glued it on to the end. The putty slurry was then painted on to the stock to start building it up and blending it in. I also painted the slurry on to the new barrel of the gun and started to smooth out some of the lumpy bits.

Now I’m waiting for the putty to cure entirely so that I can start to sand and smooth the surface. The putty is still very thin on the gun, so I’ll probably need to give the surface some protection. I will use a clear matt finish acrylic paint to achieve that.

Soon, I’ll be able to start carving the detail into the surface.

I have an old urchin shell on the veranda, I’m going to fill the interior with some plaster to make the shell less fragile and then I’m going to cover the outer surface with some silicone moulding medium. The shell has such a fantastic texture, and I reckon that, if I flatten it out, the texture will look awesome as a surface on the gun … maybe on the grip.

When the prototype is all surfaced and carved, I’ll need to cut the gun in half along it’s length so that I can remove the polystyrene from the middle. I will also need to make the shell a bit thicker by adding more filler on the inside of the shell. When I’ve done that, I can start making the transparent sections of the gun. Oh well, that’s probably a long time into the future yet … how many chickens do I have now?

Steampunk Firepower–Design Sketches

As promised, I have compiled a bunch of scans of the sketched designs that I have done. These are designs inspired by various sources, mostly science fiction fantasy novels, television and movies.

I’ve tried to honour the feeling of the sci-fi genres that I have drawn from while still thinking about how the props would feel in the hand.

I must stress that these are NOT real guns, they will not work.

This is the Rocky Horror design, it’s a basic shape. The movie version was such a lovely and slick design. The ray gun here seemed to have no moving parts and was a simple shiny metal object.

The Marshall is a pistol design based on the Colt Navy. The addition of a bayonette onto the end is a bit of a unnecessary hardware, but it gives the impression that the hand holding the gun is resolute.

This is a plasma gun. The idea is that the panel at the rear of the gun would be a transparent plastic panel with glowing swirling lights.

A personal flamethrower is always something to pack when you are heading out for a night on the town. Especially when the likes of Nyarlhotep are about.

The Angels Wings is a personal cannon for the fashion conscious lady adventurer.

Another in the personal cannon range. The Big Mumma packs the kind of punch that even Dagon would envy. This is the kind of firepower that would be handy when the odds are stacked against you.

The third in the personal cannon range, the Heavy Handed is simple and straight forward. Point and Kablooie … problem solved. The Heavy Handed is the sort of gun that makes even the smallest adventurer a force to be reckoned with … although an enhanced arm would not go amiss when trying to cope with the recoil.

The Duelling Pistol is a reproduction flintlock pistol, this sketch is more about the lines and the dimensions. The old duelling pistols were pieces of art.

As were  the trigger plates for the duelling pistols…

I am very fond of the design of The Ray Gun. There is a very satisfying balance to this sketch, when I have completed the Unearthly Power, this will be my next project.

The Unearthly Power is a fairly simple design and the overall shape is based on a Bosch drill. This is my first design that I am producing as a physical prototype. So far … so good. I’m going to have to remake the prototype as I am also experimenting with materials, but … meh, whatever. The prototype is based on the sketch, I will be making deviations from the design as my skill limits are reached.

I also plan to make a backpack device that can plug in to several of the designed guns.

Steampunk Firepower–Prototype

Building the prototype

So far I have built the basic body of the gun. The body is made from several layers of polystyrene glued together with Poly Vinyl Acetate (PVA).

The polystyrene was harvested from a bunch of old computer and tool packaging. The hardest part was cutting out usable pieces of polystyrene … most of it is holes and voids so that the manufacturer can save cost.

The laminated polystyrene was then cut using a bandsaw, hacksaw and craft knife, and then smoothed using a 120 grit sandpaper.

I needed to fill some of the holes in the polystyrene, so I did some experimenting. First, I tried filling the voids with more PVA. This worked OK, but the glue is not able to be sanded very well.

Next, I used plaster of Paris. This worked fairly well, but it chips and breaks easily and it also takes a while to go off.

Next, I used a two part epoxy resin. This sands better, but it also eats the polystyrene.

To counteract the corrosion, I applied a coat of an acrylic paint. This worked well and showed up the rough spots well. The paint and epoxy solution takes even longer than the plaster solution … so on with the experimentation.

My next option was auto-body filler. I used a Selley’s multipurpose filler. This is styrene based, and so, also corrodes the polystyrene. I did this in a couple of layers. First, a thin layer that would corrode the polystyrene somewhat, and then build it up with subsequent layers and sanding.

Next I will use a water based wood filler. This will allow me to make the consistency of the filler according to my needs as well as being non-corrosive. I’ll start with a fairly thin layer of filler to seal the polystyrene and then build it up with thicker layers until I have about 3mm coverage. This should give me the thickness that I need to carve with the Dremmel.

The body is now made up of several different materials and so it can only be considered “experimental”, that is, it will not work as a usable prototype.

Electronics Prototyping

I’ve started to solder up some of the electronic circuitry for the bling of the gun. At the moment, my plans are to have a pulsing LED light being expressed through a set of resin “port-holes” in the main body and for a set of chasing LED lights circling the “barrel” of the gun. In total, there are only 9 LED lights (8 x 3mm and 1 x 5mm).

The prototype circuit for the pulsing LED light is under way and I will start on the chasing LED lights next. At the moment, this will be prototyped on two separate PCB, but I will reorganise the circuits so that they will fit on one later.

The above circuit is the schematic for the pulsing LED light. The schematics that I found on the interweb call for a 555 timer, I’ve adapted the schematic to use a 556 dual timer instead, as that’s what I had to hand. I may expand the prototype later to utilise both timers in the 556 such as:

This circuit will give me two pulsing LED lights, rather than just the one. If I change the resistor of the second LED, then the two LED lights will be out of phase too … that would be groovy. Anyway, the single LED will do for now. I am a novice in electronics, so it may be a bridge too far at the moment.

The main challenge for the lighting of the gun will be manufacturing the epoxy domes. The electronics themselves are fairly straight forward and reasonably inexpensive.

I plan to stow the 9V battery in a compartment in the grip of the gun so that I can easily change the battery when it needs it.

What I have learned

I’d like to get some thicker polystyrene, I will pay for some and get it in sheets. The hardware store sells polystyrene sheets, so some more investment is needed.

Using a non-corrosive filler, such as a water based wood filler is much better and causes far fewer toxic fumes in my workshop.

I will always end up with a lumpy surface after filling, so sandpaper and rasps are my friends.

The most important thing for me to remember is that, starting over is not such a bad thing. The prototype will be invested in silicone so that I can make solid reproductions of it, so getting it right at the start is far cheaper (in time and money) than trying to fix it later on in the process.

When planning your model, plan for space for the electronic gubbins if you are going to add any, it will dramatically reduce the amount of anguish later on when you try to fit the electronics.

Steampunk Firepower–Introduction

I’ve been toying with the idea of building a Steampunk gun or two. I’ve seen some cosplay props online and, while they are very pretty … they are not very durable. Virtually all of them are cast resin. If you are out there cosplaying, do you really want to break your $800+ prop? Not really.

From what I’ve seen, these props range from $200 – $2,500, so that’s a pretty hefty investment to risk breaking. I can’t see it happening, myself.

My plan is to make a prototype Steampunk cosplay prop out of aluminium and add some electronics into the mix to make these props really stand out.

I’ve started with a fairly simple design, using a drill as my template I’ve carved out the grip and body of the gun in polystyrene and then coated it in resin and filler to give it a smooth and workable surface. When I’ve finished modelling the surface, I’ll go to town with the Dremmel rotary tool to add some more detail.

I’ve added a barrel to the gun and I’ll do some more building up of the surface to make it look better.

I’ve also started designing some electronic circuits so that the gun has some dynamic visual interest. This will be delivered as a set of LED lights that do pulsing and chasing. I’m also investigating using electroluminescent wire to deepen the visual identity of the prop, but from what I’ve seen so far, electroluminescent wire doesn’t have a very long lifetime … that may have to wait for improvements in the technology.

Anyway, that’s the plan for now.

Grid on a .NET form

I needed to place a grid on the main form in a .NET application, the grid is a height field that I am generating for a random terrain generator.

When the form is loaded, the nMap class is instantiated with some definition stuff. The nMap class is where I process the grid of data representing the map cells. There is some processing stuff in the class that sets the RGB values for each of the cells.

Public Sub drawGrid(Optional ByVal minLines As Boolean = True, Optional ByVal majLines As Boolean = True)
        Dim cellRef As Long = 1024
        PictureBox1.Image = New Bitmap((CInt(nMap.width) * 10) + 20, (CInt(nMap.height) * 10) + 20)
        Using g As Graphics = Graphics.FromImage(PictureBox1.Image)
            Dim grayPen As New Drawing.Pen(Color.Gray)
            Dim blackPen As New Drawing.Pen(Color.Black)
            'cellcolour
            For i As Long = 0 To (nMap.width * nMap.height) - 1
                cellRef = i
                Dim nColour As New Color
                'Dim nAry As cellRGB = nMap.grid(i)
                'nColour = Color.FromArgb(nAry.R, nAry.G, nAry.B)
                Dim nAry() As String = nMap.grid(i).ToString.Split(":")
                nColour = Color.FromArgb(nAry(0), nAry(1), nAry(2))

                Dim nBrush = New SolidBrush(nColour)
                Dim X1, Y1 As Long
                X1 = 10 + ((cellRef - (Int(cellRef / nMap.width) * nMap.width)) * 10)
                Y1 = 10 + (Int(cellRef / nMap.width) * 10)
                g.FillRectangle(nBrush, New Rectangle(X1, Y1, 10, 10))
            Next

            Dim x As Integer
            Dim y As Integer

            Dim intSpacing As Integer = 10
            x = PictureBox1.Width

            'gridlines - minor gridlines
            If minLines Then
                For y = 10 To PictureBox1.Height - 10 Step intSpacing
                    g.DrawLine(grayPen, New Point(10, y), New Point(x - 10, y))
                Next
                y = PictureBox1.Height
                For x = 10 To PictureBox1.Width - 10 Step intSpacing
                    g.DrawLine(grayPen, New Point(x, 10), New Point(x, y - 10))
                Next
            End If
            'gridlines - major gridlines
            intSpacing = 100

            If majLines Then
                For y = 10 To PictureBox1.Height - 10 Step intSpacing
                    g.DrawLine(blackPen, New Point(10, y), New Point(x - 10, y))
                Next
                y = PictureBox1.Height
                For x = 10 To PictureBox1.Width - 10 Step intSpacing
                    g.DrawLine(blackPen, New Point(x, 10), New Point(x, y - 10))
                Next
            End If
        End Using
    End Sub

The Major and Minor gridlines can be turned on and off as suits. This happens in the redraw function.

Grid Mapping – random terrain generation

I am working on writing a .NET application that will be used to generate a map. The idea is to create a bump map that can be used as a height field in a GIS application for fantasy worlds (for gaming).

What I want to be able to do, is to create a grid of X x Y proportions and then using the colour values of 000-000-000 through to 255-255-255 to set the altitude at any of the cells within the grid.

The grid starts out with all values at 125-125-125 and then through a process of randomly changing the altitude, I hope to end up with a height field that is “realistic”.

One of the challenges here, is that to change the altitude of a single cell, I need to know what is going on with it’s neighbours (North, North East, East, South East, South, South West and West), so that the change in altitude reflects the neighbouring cells altitude.

To work out the neighbouring cells, I made this spread-sheet in MS Excel:

The grid is simply a 10 x 10 grid of incrementing numbers. The cells have a bunch of conditional formats applied to them so that I can see what is being picked.

P1 is just a simple equality formula, where I pick the cell that I want as the reference cell. In the above example, it is F6.

I also want the grid to wrap on the X axis but not the Y axis, so that it is a cylinder, rather than a sphere. When the reference cell is < 10  the North values are –1 and when it is > 90, the South values are also –1.

North West

North

North East

East

South East

South

South West

West

So when I change the reference cell to, say B2 I get:

and when I change it to K2, the grid looks like:

So, it wraps the way that I planned. The formulae are probably not as elegant as they could be … but they will do for now.

When I tell my program to increase the altitude of a given cell, the formula will take the average of the surrounding cells and then add the increasing value to the reference cell.

I also want to have the program increase altitude in a radiating way. That is … poke the surface. If the increase in value is going to be, say, 10, then the reference cell has 10 added to it, while the surrounding 8 cells will have 5 added to them. If the program repeats this operation on random cells and with random altitude changes, then I should end up with a bumpy map. The same will happen for reductions in altitude: –10 for the reference cell and –5 for the surrounding cells.

So far, the tool generates the height field and does the initial random altitude change:

At the moment, everything averages down. It seems that the process is currently only reducing the cell values, rather than increasing them. I will have to work out why that is happening … it could be my calculation of the average values … not sure yet. Also, the GUI that I’ve built for this allows me to turn the major and minor grid lines off, so that it looks less like a shower recess.

Anyway, that’s where I am with the terrain generator for now.