- October 3rd, 2017, 8:52 am#4899095
Oh my what a wonderful shopping list that would make...
Basically, I've got no money at the moment for a fancy fibreglass or resin Proton Pack so I'm scratch building one out of foam mats, cardboard and scraps from the garage like Tipex bottles or waste water pipe. I've started the foam work already. The newspaper clippings denotes where the cardboard boxes and stuff will go. I'm using Stefans plans but not being super accurate and most of the measuring was approximated by eye so it looked about right.
For the wiring I've just got some coloured ribbon cable which I use for electronics and then some yellow, blue and red cat5 cable for the other bits. I have some corrugated plastic cable sheathing somewhere as well.
I've also made a fairly simple circuit with a basic timer program on an Arduino as a test (on a breadboard). I want to use some lower resistance resistors to brighten up the red LEDs a little but I'm happy with the blue ones and once they're behind some transparent coloured plastic it'll look great. Once I know its all ok I will transfer the blue leds to some stripboard to go into the powercell section and then put the red LEDs into the cyclotron once I've cut some holes into it.
I'm using an Arduino instead of programming a simpler timer chip because I am future proofing myself. If I want to upgrade to using neopixel strips or florettes it'll be easy to do, as will adding a "shield" for sound effects if I go down that route.
Basically, I've got no money at the moment for a fancy fibreglass or resin Proton Pack so I'm scratch building one out of foam mats, cardboard and scraps from the garage like Tipex bottles or waste water pipe. I've started the foam work already. The newspaper clippings denotes where the cardboard boxes and stuff will go. I'm using Stefans plans but not being super accurate and most of the measuring was approximated by eye so it looked about right.
For the wiring I've just got some coloured ribbon cable which I use for electronics and then some yellow, blue and red cat5 cable for the other bits. I have some corrugated plastic cable sheathing somewhere as well.
I've also made a fairly simple circuit with a basic timer program on an Arduino as a test (on a breadboard). I want to use some lower resistance resistors to brighten up the red LEDs a little but I'm happy with the blue ones and once they're behind some transparent coloured plastic it'll look great. Once I know its all ok I will transfer the blue leds to some stripboard to go into the powercell section and then put the red LEDs into the cyclotron once I've cut some holes into it.
I'm using an Arduino instead of programming a simpler timer chip because I am future proofing myself. If I want to upgrade to using neopixel strips or florettes it'll be easy to do, as will adding a "shield" for sound effects if I go down that route.
Last edited by Mercifull on October 17th, 2017, 3:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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