Predator Computer Gauntlet, Shoulder Cannon, And Targeting Laser Control Circuit

[ksj]

Look into using a lighsaber speaker. 1/2" diameter and 3 watts of output. What are you going to use for your optocoupler/optoisolator components on the servos? You get less noise if you separate things with a separate power supply for the servos...

Oh, and that looks awesome!!!

 

[sswift]

Look into using a lighsaber speaker. 1/2" diameter and 3 watts of output.

Way ahead of you!

I've tested half a dozen speakers, and the ones used in lightsabers, the smaller silver one on the right, seems like the best bet, with the clearest and loudest audio with the 3W amp I chose. I also tried a small exciter, a type of speaker that turns the enclosure itself into the sound producing element, but it turns out you still get louder and better sound quality from a speaker inside the enclosure than from an exciter of the similar size.

That's not a prototype of the kit by the way, that's my Firecricket, a general purpose effects board that the Predator kit will be based on. So ignore the wires going everywhere!

As for servos, I wasn't planning to support those with this kit. I'd have to upgrade the design to be based on my new Firecricket XL I'll be launching in a week to do that. I simply don't have enough IO pins with the current design to handle that.

But if I do ultimately decide to support servos, I don't think optoisolators will be necessary. I don't expect a couple medum size servos will cause enough noise to be noticeable. With my proton pack kits, people run electrically noisy air pumps for eCig smoke machines and they've had no issue with noise getting into the audio subsystem. Also, if the servos do cause noise, that noise would most likely result from them drawing too much power. It's unlikely that noise could somehow filter back in through the output pins sending data to the servos, and those are where you would stick optoisolators. So optoisolators probably wouldn't help. The solution in that case would probably be to add a few bulk capacitors by the servos.

 

[ksj]

I agree with the assessment, I have just runinto issues with noise being a factor on the predator setup. I just have some soldering to do and I will know for sure whether or not the optoisolator fixes things. Regardless those units are fairly straight forward to wire in and clearly labled as to what goes where...

 

[ksj]

I agree with the assessment, I have just runinto issues with noise being a factor on the predator setup. I just have some soldering to do and I will know for sure whether or not the optoisolator fixes things. Regardless those units are fairly straight forward to wire in and clearly labled as to what goes where...

Capacitors definitely helped, but I ended up going with a servo shield by adafruit and updated the Honus code with a couple of other pieces and got it to work with a stock Arduino and servo shield. I am working on adding a vs1053 sound board for audio triggering. The servo shield uses a capacitor and mosfet and the noise issue disappeared once I switched over to the servo shield.

I ran into throw issues in the noisier convention environment so I ended up switching to a 100 watt amp (bridged to 100 watts, 50 watt in stereo mode) with a pro grade speaker that can handle the power output. 3 watts is not enough if you have more than 40db of background noise.

 

[Alex1]

Oh, I also wanted to mention that I'm considering adding two more LEDs to those alphanumeric displays, next to the vertical LEDs at the top and bottom. I created the model before I decided to include the second LED expansion module which you need to be able to drive those.

And I wanted to post this:
View attachment 37010s you can see, that's the gauntlet from the first film. I made that using a screen cap from a video of a screen used gauntlet:

I used the 9v battery in the video for size reference, scaled the image to match, and calculated the dimensions based on that. I then used those to get my boards as close as possible to movie-accurate.

If you cannot use the switch board with your particular gauntlet, I can provide you with individual switches instead. The board is just to make mounting things easier.

hello zou for sale this gauntlet?

 

[GenNoriega]

looks so cool! I wish I had the patients for this.