I thought it would be a pretty cool companion piece to my power glove light suit to have an NES Zapper that strobes. You can pick these babies up for just a few bones on ebay.
One could use a micro controller and do everything in software, but that’s far too high tech for what we are trying to accomplish. Instead we are using a simple 555 circuit.
I based mine off of this great instructable, to get a good fast strobe.
It uses:
All components sourced from ebay/amazon should run you around $3-4.
Guts of the zapper. The only thing we care about here is the switch. You can see all of the optical parts and the weights…it makes it feel more substantial.
The switch pulls, clicks, and disengages. What we want to happen is for you to pull the trigger, and have the switch stay engaged. Soooo I glued a ziptie in the base of the trigger to act as a shunt…it works a treat!
We had to cut off one of the screw posts, and clean out the plastic that held the weight to make room for the battery.
Testing our 555 circuit to strobe our 10mm super bright LED.
The bench setup.
My bench supply kicking 9V to simulate our 9V battery.
How beautiful is this circuit!
Super bright LED wired in.
9V hookup wired through the switch to our 555 circuit.
Squeezing everything into the guy…fits quite nicely.
I’ve been cooking this up in my head for a while now, and here it is…or at least the first version of it. This is technically my 4th light suit to make, and my best yet 🙂
One of my favorite bands Hypercrush had a video where one of the guys was wearing a power glove that had lasers coming out of the ends. I had already made a light suit, and thought…what a waste. I thought “Why not control the suit with the power glove?” And thus it was born.
This new generation uses individually addressable LEDs that are controlled by a single pin…no pulse width, no mosfets…soooo siimple.
Since you are here to watch the video, here it is. The build log follows after.
Cut to 6:23 for the suit in action.
Materials are:
There’s a nice teardown here. I followed his example when I gutted the circuit boards, but my wiring differs, though.
dry fitting the 10mm lights where the ultrasonics once were
LED dry run
One frosted, one not
The 5 meter ws2812 strip
Test rig for the lights…just to try them out.
The strip cut in half. I then trimmed the rubber sheath back. They already have tiny holes ready to go!
The data flows in a single direction, so you connect the out to the in. There are tiny arrows that show you. I take data and power/ground and tie them together.
This is wiring into the bend sensors to test.
The diodes pull power reverse of what I wanted, soooo I bridged them all together to test.
As you can see the top of the board is gone, and a lot of wires have been freed up.
I used 10K resistors on each bend sensor to act as a voltage divider.
I’m using liquid electrical tape to protect everything.
I’m using 10K pull down resistors for each button. This keeps the buttons digital pins from floating.
/09/DSC06507.jpg” alt=”These are the buttons wired into the pull downs and then to the digital pins.” width=”640″ height=”480″ class=”size-full wp-image-4971″ /> These are the buttons wired into the pull downs and then to the digital pins.[/caption]
One frosted and one not. I like to sand them to diffuse the light.
The arduino pro mini
Pins bent to save space.
300 ohm protection resistor on the data pin.
All the connections on. The ends are hot glued together to keep everything solid.
Glove all closed up.
My test station setup.
A sketch I wrote that shows bend sensor readings and button outputs.
Cheap-o dollar store USB cables.
The gauge of the wire is thin, so I use two.
I’m using an Ikea cutting board to join the two pieces in the center. It is strong, flexible, and cheap( about a dollar).
1000 uF cap…helps protect the LEDs.
Everything joined together.
Heat shrinking the cap/power cables together…keeping it all safe and sound.
You can see both the FTDI cable and the LED strip connection. The arduino pulls power via the red and yellow wires.
Next step is to make a suit for each of my two boys, and a variation for my wife. I’ve got arduinos with radios so we can all be synchronized…muhahahaha
Let me know what you think in the comments kids!
So juuuust after the 2014 US MUM, Greg Sowell, Justin Wilson, Mike Hammett, Tom Smyth, JJ Boyd, and special guests Thomas, Wayne, Gabe, Drew, and Brian join us.
Thomas is a genius engineer/instructor from Slovakia who currently works for RF Elements.
The audio is a little wacky since we recorded from Tom’s phone, but hopefully I’ve cleaned it up enough to be tolerable…if not, suffer in silence 😉
Some of the things discussed:
Mimosa gear
CCR 1072
CCR Status Update
New Gear – FTC media converter, New CRS, cAP, mAP
The Dude
NetXMS monitoring system – Latvian monitoring system
CAPsMAN – centralized management
Mikrotik Partitions
Click here to view the post!
Talk about FEEDBACK. I believe this marks a turning point for Mikrotik, and definitely for the best. Read and enjoy my friends…tons of great information…I would talk more about it, but it’s lunch time, and I’m starving…Tom had us out all flippin night…hehehe
Sooo, there were a few new product announcements, nothing mind blowing, but always good. Here’s some images for your viewing pleasure.
It looks like all of the CRS1XX series devices are your higherpower guys, while the CCR2XX series are going to be your lighter power units. All CRS8’s are supposed to be available in October.
Super cool all SFP unit…great for aggregation. 1 SFP+ to uplink to the core. I can see using this at an MDU site to aggregate all of the buildings, then uplink to your core CCR for routing.
The cAP is the answer to unifi…the idea is to pair this with CAPsMan for centralized management.
The FTC is Fiber to Copper. It is basically a gigabit media converter…what’s so cool about that? Well, it is waterproof. This means we can strap this guy to a tower, to the side of a building…it doesn’t matter. I suppose you could even use this for a FttX deployment in an active environment.
The CCR1072 isn’t new, but what is new is that it has a ship date…they are saying November “of this year”…heh. This device ONLY runs v7 which means if we see this in November, then expect to see V7 slightly before. Just told this is incorrect information…sometimes the rumor mill isn’t so accurate 😛
Cheers to all my old mates, and the new 😉
Find the newsletter here.
NetMetal5
JJ might see 80MHz channels out in the mountains, but not in my town…too dirty for that here.
mANT30 Dishes
A new round of 30dBi dishes. They look to be modeled after rocket dishes along with a quick mount for the mANT. They look very UBNT-esqe, and with the Mikrotik logo on the side I’m betting they are going to be solid pieces of kit.
SXT AC
These cute little SXTs run AC. Claims of 540Mb P2P have me all a twitter. If this is exaggerated I’d still be pleased to see 220Mb.
mAP 2n
These cute little guys are more expensive than I would have liked(I believe the 951 is cheaper), but they look fun non-the-less…and they are giving them out at the MUM!
CRS109
So I was waaaay off on my price guest. So I know Cox has one of these and he says they are getting better…perhaps it’s time to try one? Line-rate gig with an SFP port…it appears to have built in wireless. I think if I wanted a gig switch with SFP uplinks I would check out the TP-Link. What the Link doesn’t have is an SFP+ port…nor does it route. The routing performance on the CRS is equivalent to a 2011. I suppose it may fit well in a small soho.
So you guys excited about the AC stuff or what?
What’s new in 6.19 (2014-Aug-26 14:05):
*) wireless – improvements for nv2 and 802.11ac I’ve heard good things…anyone running this production yet?
*) sstp – make sstp work on i386 as well;Yaaarrrrrrr
*) ippool – improve performance when acquiring address without preference;
*) partitions – copying partitions did not work on some boards;
*) bridge – added “Auto Isolate” stp enhancement (802.1q-2011, 13.25.6)
*) ipsec – when peer config is changed kill only relevant SAs;
*) vpls – do not abort BGP connection when receiving invalid 12 byte
nexthop encoding;
*) dns-update – fix zone update;
*) dhcpv4 server – support multiple radius address lists;
*) console – added unary operator ‘any’ that evaluates to true if argument
is not null or nothing value;
*) CCR – improved performance;
*) firewall – packet defragmenting will only happen with connection tracking enabled;Let’s all say a big thank you to Janis for the following FW updates.
*) firewall – optimized option matching order with-in a rule;
*) firewall – rules that require CONNTRACK to work will now have Invalid flag
when CONNTRACK is disabled;
*) firewall – rules that require use-ip-firewall to work will now have invalid flag
when use-ip-firewall is disabled;
*) firewall – rules that have interface with “Slave” flag specified as in-/out-interface
will now have Invalid flag;
*) firewall – rules that have interface without “Slave” flag specified as in-/out-bridge-port
will now have Invalid flag;
*) firewall – rules with Invalid flags will now be auto-commented to explain why;
*) l2tp – force l2tp to not use MPPE encryption if IPsec is used;I just want to say how convenient configuring l2tp for clients has become…yep…
*) sstp – force sstp to not use MPPE encryption (it already has TLS one);
*) sstp – make it work for x86 systemsThey are so proud of this one they mention it twice..hehe
*) winbox – added dual PSU stats in health menu
*) ipv6 – Gre6 can now correctly fragment large packets
*) simple queue performance optimisation/improvement for multi-core RouterOS devices (especially CCR)I’m assuming this is x86 also?