Ok, I've been playing around a little bit more with my D.C.R.-012. Basically it's turned into my practice gun. I'm trying all my hacks and mods on this LightStrike gun first to learn my mistakes in one sand box as it were. At any rate, this time I decided to put a SPST push-button-style switch in. It turned out great functionally. Turned out horrific visually. First I decided to cut the clipping bracket off the back. I decided to take my new Dremel 4000 out for a spin on this mod, so I used a cutting disk to cut the piece off.
And then used a sanding band disk and buffing paste and felt pad. Lesson learned: Don't do that. Basically the plastic is far too soft to dremel at most speeds. You basically end up melting the plastic. Further I nicked the plastic where the headphone jack goes making it look even worse. Anyway, I finished up the job with a Xacto knife, which is what I should have started with. I cut a notch in each half of the case to fit the round button. Lesson #2, it's pretty hard to get this even, so either cut it out with the gun screwed back together, or put it on one side or the other, not along the lateral line.
I cut the lead going to the weapon select and soldered it to my push button. Interesting note about the capacitance sensing of the guns, they don't look for a specific value, but a delta in that value. If, for instance, you want to take a gator clip and temporarily clip a switch on, you have to do it while the gun is off. Otherwise it interprets the change in capacitance as having the button pressed and it cycles through the weapon settings continuously (which makes sense, I've increased the electron holding capacity of the wire lead. Cutting the copper tape off and putting the button on changed the initial value of the capacitance on startup but that initial value isn't important, it's changes in that value. Ok, here's what I considered the interesting part. The switch itself isn't enough. You have to put a wire lead hanging off the other end of the switch to hit the threshold needed to evoke the change. I tried some simple test and basically I need at least 3 inches of the wire I was using to get it to flip. To ensure it would trip. I used a red piece of solid core wire that's hard to see in my picture, but I basically just coiled it up in the dead space between the trigger housing and reload switch.
The End result, I have a button on the back of the gun that is now weapons select.
So now I can change weapons with one hand. I've got to tidy up the fit and finish a bit, there's gap still where the two halves meet and I cut too much on one side and will need to patch/bondo that back. But it works. I think the next switch I want to add is something like these two switch types:
These are both pictures from the radioshack.com website. The toggle with safety cover would look the coolest, but it's not a SPST. The 2nd switch is a SPST and it's lighted, so presumably you could add some more cool lights to the gun over all with this one. Anyway, we'll see if I actually get around to it. I had also thought it would be cool to have the weapon select button be a rotary switch, but as LYNX pointed out in his comment, rotary switches aren't typically SPST. I guess I could make Cam with a lobe on it to push a SPST button, but that'd be too much effort for me at this point. In the photos above, you can also see my 'learning' attempts with Amaco's Rub 'N Buff product line. I didn't prime the gun first, I simply started smearing it on, and it seemed to work as expected. The copper looks like it will give me the look I want. The silver leaf (not show) didn't work out as well as I had hoped. My local A.C. Moore only had those two colors, but now that I know how they look/work I feel a bit more comfortable about buying them online. I'll probably go for Ruby and Spanish Copper. Most of what I'm figuring out I've learned/read in various NERF gun mod sites and forums.
Still have a lot more practicing to do. It'll be interesting to see if this gun even functions by the time I'm done with it.
