• IT SOUNDS LIKE BEES

    Benchoff • 06/16/2015 at 07:43 • 4 comments

    I have all the parts printed, the magazine is assembled, and the motors are installed. I figured it would be a good time to test out the sticker slinging mechanism. It works, and it sounds like bees.

    This is really only half the gun. I'm especially proud of the magazine. Here's how the entire gun works:


    Pretty pictures:

    Now it's time to integrate everything and make it work. If the project is going to fail, it's going to fail here.

  • I have modeled everything I can

    Benchoff • 06/04/2015 at 16:45 • 0 comments

    I still have a week or two until the HobbyKing order comes in, so until then it's time to model the mechanicals. I'm pretty much done with that:

    That's what the entire gun is going to look like. It's somewhat cleverly designed, with the grip modeled as a mirror of itself:

    The holes in the front are for these cool little tact switches from adafruit. LiPo battery sits behind that, and the entire thing screws together.

    Of course all of this work is pointless until I can get those little quadcopter motors. I'll start printing this out in the mean time, and once those motors come I'll be launching stickers across my basement. Fun times.

    Oh, I put these models in Cura. It looks like ~= 40 hours to print everything.

  • How this thing works

    Benchoff • 06/02/2015 at 04:45 • 0 comments

    I've had a few people ask me how this thing will work. First, a picture:

    Yeah, holy crap, OpenSCAD does colors.

    So, in this image, the yellow parts are 3D printed. The light blue is a 9g servo, the purple parts are brushless outrunners designed for quadcopters, and the dark blue parts are grippy feeder things that are printed out of ninjaflex and attached to the outrunners.

    The servo, and it's accompanying grippy feeder are set slightly forward of the outrunners. This servo will grab a sticker from the magazine and feed it, with the help of a semi-circular ramp, to the outrunners. From there, the motors - spinning at a very high RPM - will launch the sticker out of the barrel.

    So it's pretty much a baseball pitching machine that you'd find in a batting cage.

  • AMMO!

    Benchoff • 06/01/2015 at 23:22 • 0 comments

    The Stickers are here, and that's the scale of them with a US quarter, nickle, and a bic lighter. Yes, they're small

    To shoot these things through a pair of flywheels, I need to know how thick they are. Here's some measurements:

    24 stickers / 9.40mm = 0.392mm

    24 stickers / 9.42 mm = 0.393mm

    20 stickers / 7.82mm = 0.391mm

    17 stickers / 6.66mm = 0.392mm

    13 stickers / 5.07mm = 0.390mm

    I'm guessing the separation between the flywheels should be around 0.38mm. The flywheels will be make out of a squishy material, anyway.

    I've finished the most dangerous part of the sticker gun: the part that holds the quadcopter motors. Just need to print it out:

  • Crap I'm Buying From Hobbyking

    Benchoff • 05/29/2015 at 04:45 • 0 comments

    Apart from some wire and pushbuttons, that's it. Everything else, except for a handgun spring and some screws, will be 3D printed.

    Oh, I found a guide for converting those servos to continuous rotation. That'll be handy.

  • The Impetus For This Project

    Benchoff • 05/21/2015 at 17:38 • 0 comments

    I'm noticing a severe lack of coolness when I hand out hackaday stickers at events. I need a gun. A gun that shoots stickers at people.

    The basic idea is something like one of those Nerf gun disk shooters that use a small DC motor to shoot foam discs. It's somewhat loud - thus cool - and they can shoot pretty far. I'll go with something like that.

    Ammo will be 1" round stickers from stickermule. They need to be round for obvious reasons, and we're already using stickermule for hackaday stickers. Here's what they'll look like:

    That'll only be 1" in diameter. Small. very small, but that's what you get when you need a ton of cheap ammo.

    Files in the github, although right now that's just a test jig for the magazine. Three lines of openscad.

    Oh, I'll be using a 2300KV brushless motor to shoot the stickers out and a 2 cell LiPo to power it. That's 17,000 RPM. Holy crap.