so for those of you who follow the lus tech tips Twitter and Instagram
um you'll already be aware that there
was recently a crisis at our
headquarters um sorry sorry still a
little difficult for me to talk about this but I became aware after returning
from a brief absence that someone had been at my desk touching my things
sorry excuse me
so naturally at that point there were two
Avenues available to me the first would
be calm measured discourse with my
trusted employees about the importance of respecting one's personal space and
possessions while the second would be to
over engineer some manner of mechanical
deterrent that would give any Interlopers a much needed Taste of
justice so in the end I
decided well let's just say this isn't a
video detailing how to host a discussion about office
protocol Mast drop is currently featuring their exclusive case 7xx red
headphones built by AKG learn more and buy one today at the link in the video
description meet the enforcer out of the box the elite strike
Rhino fire is a fully automatic fixed
Point anti-personnel Nerf gun with a 2.8
Dart per second rate of fire an arc range of up to 81 ft and a 50 Dart
ammunition drum capacity it's a beast in
its own right but it only works when I'm
around to operate it which means I needed to turn this Hefty foam Blaster
into a fully automated motion detecting
stationary Sentry turret so to accomplish this we'll need the following
three servos an Arduino a webcam and a
laptop to coordinate it all not to mention some quick rewiring and just a
touch of fine woodworking now in much the same way
that you can't make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs you can't
modify a Nerf gun without first voiding the crap out of the warranty so step one
then is to carefully mind you these things are over a hundred bucks
disassemble the Rhino fire our main objective here is to access the internal
wiring but the lighter our gun is the
easier it will be for our servos to turn it and the aptly named Rhino has a
little more junk in the trunk than we'd like out of the box which which means
we'll want to remove our bulky trigger assembly not to mention the six D Cel
batteries that also have got to go once
the gun is in pieces this is also a great time to give it a quick makeover
doing it up right involves laboriously sanding off all the logos then taping
and painting in layers etc etc etc but that's literally as interesting as
watching paint dry so we're going to skip over that with some video Magic
ah much better so as you can see we've
removed some excess weight at the back pulled out the battery pack and isolated
the internal switch that turns on the motor next we need to assemble the body
of the turret that this will sit on this
bottom box is where we install the webcam and laptop so it needs to be nice
and roomy our first Servo goes inside
the top of the box and the gun bracket is mounted on top which allows rotation
along the x-axis we want to keep the load on the servos as light as possible
especially when at rest which means keeping the weight off of the moving
components themselves now our first plan
was to Simply place this ring of ball bearings between the box and the gun
bracket but during the prototyping stage
we found that to be insufficient the wood was just too rough and the bearings
were too small for this to be an effective solution so the way we Sol
that then was to layer the Ring of ball
bearings between some discarded CDs thanks AOL that we attached to the wood
the CDs are the perfect size though some minor modification was necessary to make
room for the servo and they're smooth enough that the bearings were able to
roll properly greatly reducing the strain on our servos now that we had
turn we needed tilt good news though the
Rhino comes with a tripod mount already ready that is located close to Center
Mass so we gently modified this to allow
a dowel to be inserted the dowel fits into two ball bearings that are housed
in wood panels on either side allowing for ease of movement since the gun isn't
perfectly balanced we added some small weights until it required very little
effort to tilt it up and down now our
Servo installed at the end of the dowel can tilt the gun more quickly
drastically improving the ability of our s entry to track its Target so with the
wood frame built we next mounted the remaining servos the Arduino and our
battery packs now while our initial plan
was to wire the internal motor of the Rhino directly to the Arduino in the end
we decided to go with a third Servo and a 3D printed prong controlling a
mechanical switch then with all of that in place we just needed to neatly wire
it all together then hook it up to the laptop and webcam in the base and and
run the software that we downloaded from Project Sentry gun. Rudolf Labs.com a
super awesome open-source Sentry project that you should totally check out by the
way now I'll take a moment to give you guys a quick Pro tip when you set out to
do a wiring job like this no matter how small the project is or how simple you
initially assume it will be pick up at least two different colors of wire red
and black for positive and negative are pretty standard don't just get one color
because you're confident that you can keep keep everything straight and you
think green is pretty you will end up 4 hours deep into the project surrounded
by hastily marked wires from five different Motors and two different batteries in a hopeless tangle deeply
confused and full of regret so so much
regret all right let's get back on topic before our final test we've got one more
housekeeping item our final job looks a little messy so uh hey can we get some
of that video magic going on here I guess we're just going to have to
embrace the whole junkyard Chic
aesthetic thing testing
time oh my
God oh my God success I can now feel comfortable
leaving the office knowing that my tools pens and prawns will rest
unmolested of course for the majority of the time when I'm here I don't actually
want this thing hovering behind me so I needed to find a way for it to pull
double duty fortunately with the help of a little open- Source facial recognition
software it can be easily repurposed as an employee morale
booster now that's what I call a motivational
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guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check
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