ThePixel Frickelprojekte

Still on it... while waiting for more lenses from china I did some redesigns and more redesigns and even more redesigns to improve printability, handling, room, filament consumption and stability. I decided to make a modular version which can be used with or without gunstock as the printing times are so looooong you might better go with the pistol version and print the rest later if really required. Now it got room for the battery and attachable slots for "silencer" and gunstock.   I hope I still know at the end which were which :-/

Meanwhile I did some further modeling on the tagger and printed a first prototype for tests of space and handling. And of course I already found some things that are stupid or not very functional. Plus I forgot to add some gaps for the neopixel light effects. Anyway, the part in the blue rectangle is too angular, it just doesn´t feel good in handling. The section in the green rectangle is a tunnel for the radio antenna, actually it was dumb to keep it half closed on the right side, which I intended as room for a longer antenna if required. Apart from that speaker and display fit pretty well but the footing for the pcb should be wider, otherwise very tiny screws are required to not break the print.   Then there was a mass of support material required, so I deceided to print it at a 45° angle, however sadly this doesn´t reduce the printing time ~13h but at least a lot less wasted material.  Did I mention I need a faster printer?   Anyway, I will print the other shell side before I am cha

Alright, this post is about the most important thing about OSDYLS, the IR communication. Before I started this I already bought a bunch of IR diodes and receivers that other people recommended in their attempts or just looked logical to me. Meanwhile I believe this is the part where most of the DIY attempts got stuck. Lets go through these projects: Pewduino There was much time and energy spent on this project, including own PCB and more, my deepest respect! Luckily today, due to the availability a lot of *duino electronics, noone has to reinvent anything anymore. He somewhere wrote he would go for a 50mm lens . Reason: focal length.  If you have a look at all these shopable lasertag toys you will notice a pretty small lens and IMHO there is a reason for this. If you start with a big lens you are able to transport more light to the target. True but it also starts with a bigger diameter and will end up in an even wider diameter at the target. I don´t see any advantage but I might be wro

With all (hopefully) collected components I am going to start with getting those to work with the S2 mini as I haven´t worked with that before. It behaves slightly different to the D1 when uploading the code but after reinstalling my Arduino IDE everything is good to go: 1. WLED 2812B strip for status indication  This is IMHO the simplest way to add some nice hit or being hit status to the tagger, in addition to the small OLED display, and it is up to everybody how many LEDs will be used. I will use only 3 as it keeps the power consumption low but already allows sort of animations. These strips usually draw about 0.06A / RGB when they are at 100% brightness and they (surprise!) do work with 3.3V just fine even if they are rated for 5V. So that would be a max of 0,6W for them.   As you can see I got myself the fritzing tool since it will come in handy to save the circuits to some sort of external memory plus if I decide to use some PCB service at the end to produce a small amount of boa