WIP: Stormblade with interior

[Chrome]

It was not so much the wires as the metal and magnets I had in mind there since you cannot insulate them without removing their purpose.

Here we have my old schematic for the tank, just for fun:

And with Cassars idea about the lighted coils I made this:

And for you who know your electronics out there, I can\'t remember the right symbol for LED-lights so I just used the one for ordinary bulbs.
Just don\'t tell my old electronics teacher about these, he\'d probably kill me. lol

 

[hestan101]

cant magnets be insulated with paper for instance without disrupting the magnetic field?

 

[Chrome]

without disrupting the magnetic field, definitely. But remember that what you are after is the circuit above all and anything insulating the magnets will risk cutting the circuit, neither the magnets nor their counterpart can be painted or isolated in any such way. But getting the plus and minus magnets not touching each other is easy, no need to worry about it.

 

[Meph]

True, true. That probably means that the double-magnet-method won\'t work on rotatable parts as you\'ll break the circuit one tou turn the turret. For turrets it might perhaps be worth looking into working with a small jack... I\'m no electrics expert by far but doesn\'t a mini-jack also work with low voltage +/- circuits? Like the kind you\'d use for ear phones for an mp3 player? in an electronics shop you\'d be able to by DYI minijack female and male plugs. If that should work you could just buy a couple and literally jack in every turret variant. The plug would also act as a pivot so no magnets would be even needed.

 

[Chrome]

that is a good idea as well. But the magnets losing their connection via pivoting isn\'t an issue as mounting one magnet/piece of metal in the center pivoting point and the other being a circle of metal around the center with a fixed magnet maintains the connection even in 360 degrees turns of the turret.

Like this:

As stated I like the idea of using 3.5mm plugs for that kind of thing, saves space and looks darn cool and more advanced than it really is, only problem I see with it being when applied to something of smaller scale, the pins and female can get too long for the model.

 

[Meph]

Ow, cool idea with the magnet/ring setup!
Takes a lot of construction though.

Hmm, true, 3.5mm jack will probably only fit in larger turrets. Perhaps 2.5mm jacks might fit in stuff like predator turrets and such.

 

[Chrome]

It certainly does take some assembly, but then again so does inserting a male-female story into the tank as well.

Didn\'t get much done today at all. It became more of a relaxing day with my girl (meaning she being at her computer, me being at mine/the TV and we actually talk for a while. lol)

I did however get some commission work done, getting me a small step closer to only having to worry about my own stuff again.

 

[Meph]

You talk to the TV? :O

 

[Chrome]

Meph, you have one of those invalid links again.

Ok, now I bring some sad news people, it seems like the idea with lighting up the coils on the cannon needs a bit of revising, I have learned the hard way that the plastics in my plasticard and in my pipes are very different in how they handle light, the differences are of the extreme kind sadly. the card I am using now is in fact thinner than the tube and here we have the results:

I am thinking that if I have enough pipes to do the whole thing in them that might create a cool effect and save the project. As for now it isn\'t looking bright for the plans to illuminate though.

 

[Meph]

Arr that link is something gone awry with my signature, I checked it, the link was correct and now it disappeared... The guy who saved teh world is \"Stanislav Petrov\". Stumbled upon it recenlty, seriously, look him up on wikipedia...

About the lighting, yeah that cars is a bit on the thin side.
Possible solution.: Spray several layers of varnish to thicken it; You could even use matte or satin varnish to diffuse the light a bit perhaps? Best test such a thing on a spare piece though...

If you wanna go abit more DIY, you could buy some plexiglass of the desired thickness, with the desired clarity. Heat it with a hair dryer or a hot air aint stripper on low setting and bend the warmed up and plyable plexigrass around a suitable shape? I did such a thing way back in arts college, worked pretty good to manipulate it.

 

[Chrome]

Thing is, I want the transparency that the side part has, that\'s the only way to get the effect without having to turn every light around off. I have now tried to make something useful with pipes trying to flatten them a bit but with no real luck this far... I think I\'ll try with a few smaller pipes and just cut them in half and build an \"internal\" set of coils.

 

[cassar]

the barrell problem

why are you using plasticard at all, surely the the barrel of the plasma cannons has a strip both top and bottom all you need is a thin strip of plastic say from a spru that you can attach the piping to which will then be covered by the outer plating of the gun all you should have on show then will be the outer edges of the plasma coils

 

[Chrome]

Here is my idea:

What the plasticard does is dimming and evening out the light from the diodes to create a \"shine\" instead of a light. If I didn\'t use a medium through which the diodes could light the coils up from the inside I would need to light the coils from the base of the coils themselves. That approach would demand at least two diodes per lap of coil(upper side, one to the left and one to the right, both in the center) since the diodes are not strong enough to light the cable used all the way around.

I do indeed use a stem for which to connect top and bottom of the cannon and that is also the fastening point for the plasticard. There is no real stability added from the plasticard since I\'m only using 0.6mm and thinner pieces. It\'s only there for the lightbox effect.

 

[cassar]

scratch my last

i see the problem now the plasticard is the barrel, forget what i\'ve just said in my last post instead glue reflective tin/aluminium foil to the underside of the plasticard it might solve the translucency problem while giving you a wee bit more brightness to the led, also dont forget you will be painting the outer surface of the plasticard at some point

 

[Chrome]

There is something I learned at my last job actually(a lit sign constructor), a matte white surface spreads the bouncing light giving a soft, even reflection while a totally reflective surface bounce the light directly giving a hard, direct reflection.

 

[Chrome]

The approach of building the entire lightbox with tube halves was a success! The shine is very even and with three diodes in there later I believe it will light up perfectly.
The lit cannon is still on the table!

 

[cassar]

my bad i thought you were going to use the round tubular led\'s they must just be for the generators

 

[Chrome]

Round Tubular LED\'s?

 

[cassar]

page 6 8th photo down that tubular set up seems evenly lit to me just a matter of getting the tube thin enough to fit the barrell with the piping wrapped around it

 

[Chrome]

Lighting

I will keep the images small in this update since there is no need for detail at the moment.

Here we have all different kinds of parts that will be lighted later, plus the testing tube I made just to see how the light behaves, my testing battery and the testing diode:

First: the lighting of the testing tube in \"normal\" inside lighting.

Then the parts that will be inside the tank later

And the coils on the barrel (without actual coils at the moment)

Those pictures are a bit brighter than they are for real but I think they give a good idea of how one will think the light behaves when installed properly.
Here we have three more detailed pics of how the light actually behaves inside each part:

The bright line indicates roughly where the diode is at the moment, in reality it is a bit to the left of that line and the line is not as bright as on the photo.
So, with the test tube being the one that is nearly perfectly lit and it being the smallest part of them all, I will need more diodes to light the other parts. So, two diodes per \"reactor\" and three per side of the gun barrel should be enough to give a satisfactory glow.
The ones in the barrel will have a reflector set looking something like this: