Building a Coilgun: Round 5
As Cage The Elephant said, there ain't no rest for the wicked.
I had been working on a new coilgun design on my spare time from about January 2020 onwards. Time passed, nations plunged into dissarray, and I wound up working at Hacksmith again for my final co-op.
Spoiler: The new version keeps catching fire. I'm working on it.
Building a Coilgun: Round 4
At this point in the adventure, I am working at Hacksmith Entertainment, and have been instructed to build the largest coilgun we are legally permitted to construct.
How hard could it possibly be?
(And so began the legacy of Boaty McGunface. But we'll get back to that later.)
Building a Coilgun: Round 3
I happen to have acquired four 1000-foot rolls of 18AWG automotive wiring.
What else was I supposed to do?
It's coilgun time. Round 3. Fight.
2018-07-31 Remote controlled tank, part 4: Crunch.
The perks of living with a guy who owns a 3D printer
I moved back to Markham for a co-op position at Flex Automotive Solutions in May.
A few weeks before the term was set to start, and well before the last update, I found a place to live. I sublet a basement apartment from a chemical engineer, Ed. Ed owns a 3D printer.
2018-05-21 Remote controlled tank, part 3: The other sort of hardware
Begone, electrical demons!
With the motor controller working, the mechanical side of things became the next focus.
Let me preface that with this. Also, spoiler alert.
2018-03-07 Remote controlled tank, part 2: The boards, or A Crash Course in Debugging Hardware.
They're all here!
Monday morning, A large package arrived in the mail, containing a solder stencil and ten shiny red PCBs.
They were ordered from JLC PCB in 2 ounce copper. And they are beautiful. They were ordered while China (Yes, the whole country) was closed on holidays, so I had plenty of time to spot my errors, as noted in the last post, and bemoan my bad PCB design. Live and learn.
2018-03-01 Remote controlled tank, part 1: Designing a big motor controller.
"You know what would be cool," I rhetorically asked a friend, "a remote control tank that has some serious heft to it. Like, some really serious heft.
"How about large enough to sit on and get carried by?"
"Sounds perfect".
Airsoft photogate chronograph
Sometimes, you need a tool that performs as well as possible. This is not that. Sometimes, you need a tool that is cheap. This is not that. I did not, truly, need this tool, but there is something to be said for trying to build something just to see if you can. This is that.
An airsoft chronograph is a tool for determining the muzzle velocity (and, more importantly, muzzle energy) of an airsoft gun, or any other projectile device. These are a necessity for anyone who modifies or experiments with airsoft guns with hopes to actually use them in a game, since most airsoft fields restrict muzzle velocity to a certain number (typically, between 375 and 425 feet per second). A store-bought chronograph typically costs north of a hundred dollars. For what I believed could be accomplished with a pair of photogates and a microcontroller, this seemed too expensive.
So, of course, I set about building one from scratch.
Building a Coilgun: Round 2
Years ago, I stumbled upon a rather majestic YouTube channel: ACGSite. It was run by a man who, for a hobby, built coilguns. By the dozen. His coolest (in my opinion) was a design based on a Desert Eagle pistol that fired with enough energy to punch a hole in a soda can. The channel was closed down several years ago for some reason, but remained a part of my imagination.
Later that week, with a handful of disposable camera flash units in hand, I learned a few harsh lessons about high voltage electronics. Sure enough, though, I managed to build a cute little peashooter. It could launch a finishing nail about 5 metres from shoulder height, and destroyed the switching element every few shots. In short: It was crap, but not too bad for a 9th grade student.
Fast forward three years, a friend of mine gifts me fifty 35 volt, 2200 microfarad capacitors. Fast forward to the start of my second term of mechatronics engineering, I'm bored, have alll my electronics parts with me in Waterloo, and realize that I have all the parts to handily outperform my last attempt.
How to make a website the strange way
Once upon a time, there was a guy who built stuff. He got into engineering school, and continued making cool things. But then, disaster struck: He had failed to document the cool things, so all his friends were getting the cool jobs that he wanted. Something had to be done.
And so, this website was born. GitHub pages was chosen as a host on the recommendation of a friend. Included in GitHub Pages is Jekyll, which allows for generation of blogs from markdown documents. It is a quick, easy, painless method for generating static pages and putting them on a website.
But where's the fun in that?