The Mk.1 prototype of my full-size replica DL-44 Blaster from Star Wars. This was painstakingly built during spring 2014 as an early electronics project of mine and made just in time for Star Wars Day 2014; this was difficult to engineer to say the least. The gun functions via pulling the trigger which is rigged up to Technic pulleys and rubber bands, which strikes a Radio Shack momentary pushbutton, which is wired to a microchip stored in the gun’s magazine. The microchip for the light module was made by me using components and a 555 IC timer to make the LED in the gun’s barrel pulse on for one second when hit. The light module is connected in parallel with a hacked Radio Shack sound recorder module, which is ultimately connected to a 9 Volt battery stored in the gun’s handle.
After this test project was completed and photographed, I then moved onto rebuilding the inner circuit to have a custom microchip programmed with Arduino and with an ATmega32 as a brain — the Mk.2 edition. This revised version had a stronger design and contained a homemade electronics circuit inside to make the light flash and sound effect play loud.