A breadboard is useful for setting it all up to ensure you have the correct wiring before soldering it all together. Dupont cables can be helpful here. I started with the ELEGOO Mega R3 Project Kit if you want to play with electronics. It’s expensive but contains lots of parts I can use on other projects.
You can see from the picture and video how the electronics can be fitted into the gun chamber. I started with 4 x AAA batteries, but they’re quite heavy (as is a 9v battery) and pushes the electronics to the front of the rifle. This may put unnecessary weight when held by the endoskeleton.
I reengineered to use a LiPoly battery and charger to reduce the weight and also so I didn’t have to open up the rifle when the batteries are drained. A USB cable can be fitted plugged into the charger by removing the power clip at the back. See the charger with a blue light and the USB connector pointing downwards:
The video below shows the push button fixed behind the trigger and the LiPoly version. You can see more electronics are behind the handle, making the rifle more balanced.
Once the electronics are put together the gun fires randomly, but pulling the trigger can make it fire manually. Power off/on again to return to random fire.
The Arduino Nano needs programming first in order to control its behaviour…
Programming the Arduino Nano requires some tools. The program can be found on GitHub. To program your Arduino you will need to follow a few steps:
't800-rifle'
and copy the following files from the GitHub project into it:src/main.cpp
(Delete and rename this to the main t800-rifle.ino
file in your project)src/t800rifle.cpp
src/diags.cpp
include/diags.h
include t800rifle.h
include/ver_info.h
t800-rifle.ino
file and rename main.cpp
to t800-rifle.ino
Check out the Arduino IDE for a little ‘easter egg’…
You will also need to load the WAV files into the sound card.
The sounds folder in the above project contains .m4a
files for various muzzle flashes. Also a script m4a2wav.sh
which creates Tnn.WAV
for each nn.M4A
file. WAV files take up more space, but play faster on the AdaFruit SFX board.
Run the m4a2wav.sh
script to create the T*.WAV files and then copy them to the AdaFruit SFX board as specified in the documentation.
The script wav2sfx.sh
and wav2sfx.cmd
copy the T*.WAV files to the Adafruit SFX board. Note that Mac OS (un)helfully creates a .fseventsd
file when the SFX board is mounted which can mess up with directory entry positioning. File are assumed to be copied in sequence so file directory entry 0 is T00.WAV
, entry 1 is T01.WAV
etc.
Even if you delete .fseventsd
, it takes entry 0 in the directory, so Adafruit plays the wrong file.
Only reliable solution I found ATM is to mount the USB on Windows, delete all the files and use the Windows script to copy the files one by one in order.
Or use Linux if available to do the same.
If somehow the SFX board file system gets messed up, follow these instructions to wipe the card. Note reformatting with the normal operating system format commands will likely render the file system unreadable by the SFX board itself. I also found you need a decent USB cable otherwise it will corrupt the card.
NB: Do not fit if using the gun as a toy. Lasers can damage eyes if fired into the face!
I would suggest only doing this if you have an aptitude for electronics. You will need to dismantle the laser pen to remove the electronics and then solder resistors, along with red and blue LEDs.
Hopefully this will help any budding modellers to make modifications to their T-800 Endoskeleton. With this rifle modification, my T-800 Eyes modification and the excellent modification from Alex McPherson it creates an epic combination.