Another simple LightStrike gun Mod

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.

Light Strike Bits decoding spreadsheet

I've taked a few times about 'decoding the bits' so I thought I would finally get around to putting up a spreadsheet for anyone to see. A quick refresher of how I'm counting/tracking the output from the light strike devices: 65 'signals' come from the device. They come in two types: Pulses or Spaces. This is what the LIRC software refers to them as, so I just continue that. If it's wrong, it's GIGO from LIRC to me to you. The first signal is a large pulse, typically double the value of all other pulses you will get. This is the 'frame start' if you want to think of it in terms of a networking packet. The next 64 'bits' of information are alternating pulses and spaces. The pulses are constant. They're the markers between spaces to let you know when a space starts and ends. Since the pulses are simply borders for your spaces, you are left with 32 bits of data in your frame. Because I cheat and take the output from one of the LIRC utilities rather than reading the pulses directly, I count the pulses and spaces together for 64 'bits' in my coding (mostly because when I started I wasn't 100% sure if the pulses might have a hidden significance). So when you view the spreadsheet, even numbers are the spaces, odds are the pulses.

Here is the google docs spreadsheet of my light strike bit decodes.  There are four tabs, one for the rifles, one for the pistols, one for the ITS and bit math where convert the bits from binary to base10 numbers to see the relative values.  The pistols sheet is a work in progress, I only took one stab at decoding the only pistol anyone in my group has.  It had surprising results.  A laser strike from a pistol is different than the laser strike from the rifle.  It makes sense in a way.  The rifle bits add up to the number 1344, but the laser strike on the pistol is only 258 it seems.  They seem drastically different which means I should probably revalidate the values coming out of the pistol.

I'll probably create a code.google.com project to dump my simple perl code into at some point too, with the hopes that someone who is an actual developer can take it further.

test pictures

testing a picture

I'm playing with a new blog editor called MarsEdit and want to see if it's worth buying.  Want to see if it can upload images directly to blogger.com blogs.

Migrating from my old blog to this new blog...

Right now my blog is hosted on PowWeb.com and it's been great, but I'm tired of managing the wordpress config myself, so I'm going to google's Blogger.com setup so it will be all tied into my existing google apps accounts for my vanity domain.  There's bound to be a lot of mistakes as I copy the posts over, so please bare with me.  I won't actually change the DNS entries until I get the stories 100% migrated.

For now I've run into the post limit for the day, so it'll have to wait until tomorrow.  Someday http://rich.whiffen.org will be here.

Light strike scope accessory tear down

So I got around to taking apart my Light Strike scope. I didn't like that my gun was black but the scope is brown. I also didn't like how it looked or the plastic used to simulate the optics of a scope.


Other than enabling the two shot types for your gun, it wasn't that appealing to me over all and I doubted I would ever actually use it. So I decided to break it open. Break is the operative word here. Even after you remove the numerous screws hiding under the stickers (six of them I think) the scope doesn't come apart easily. The front plastic lens housing is essentially melted/glued in place. So you would not be able to take apart your scope and put it back together. I was thinking it might be fun to put a real laser pointer inside or some thing to act like a reflex sight to make it look cooler. No such luck.

There really isn't much to the scope. It doesn't actively do anything other than flash the LEDs and enable the fire modes in software. I'm guessing some transistors and capacitors or resistors. I don't know how to tell the difference between SMD capacitors and SMD resistors. They have numbers like 101, 470 and other such values on them. The transistors have numbers too but I can't read them (they have three solder points so I'm guessing they're transistors). From there its a ribbon cable to the multicolor LED and red LED. The multicolor is the one that lights up the plastic dome on the top of the scope with your team color. The red one simply makes the red dot appear in the center of the rear optic.

So it would be quite simple to replace those two with something else like a real laser pointer. I took a laser pointer from a trade show apart and extracted just the laser goodies out of it, so if I can find something cool the mount it in, I will likely take the red LED out and replace it with a laser pointer.

Here's a closer view of the PCB.

Another interesting thing I found out: the ports are not interchangeable. You cannot plug the scope into the launcher/rapid fire port. The gun shuts down if you do. So my theory that the ports were a parallel bus before is wrong. Thankfully the gun doesn't fry if you plug it in backwards or in the wrong port. Anyway, there yo have it, the internals of the scope. I might decide to take apart the rapid fire system to see what's inside there as well.

iCloud and iCal part two...

Well, still no traction on why iCloud spammed former clients with appointment accepts. I did get an email from Ed K. who seems to have the same problem and like me can find little or no information on it. If you're iCloud is accepting old appointments, pile on a discussion thread I started: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3411914 and maybe we'll get some traction that way.

This is the real danger of the cloud. All of the forensic data I would normally use to track these kind of issues down are not available to me. The cloud owns them and they are not going to be forthcoming with information about errors and outages. I think that's an interesting aspect of cloud computing that is worth some discussion. Security in the cloud is an issue for a lot of people because it's very difficult to know who truly can access your data. I think it becomes even worse if someone does get your data and you need forensic data to track it down. For example if you are a new start-up and have some super-secret and valuable information that is stolen via the cloud, would Amazon give you all the information you would need to track the perpetrators down? Just because it's valuable to you, doesn't mean it has the same value to Amazon.   

As an aside, my choice of Amazon isn't meant to imply that they would or would not behave badly in that senario, just talking in hypotheticals.

My first Light Strike Mod and tear down photos

All right! It's light strike mod time! I've decided to hack my  D.C.R.-012 and do some mods to it. After you remove the stickers (which is a little too easy, the adhesive isn't very good) it looks like this:


The little copper patches are the 'switches' from the stickers. They are capacitance sensor based, which is neat and disappointing at the same time, because it make putting a real switch there complicated. Anyway, on one side there are a boat load of screws that need to be removed and the orange end-cap on the barrel needs to be taken off (comes off easy). After that, you see something like this:

Picture is a bit blurry, but you get the idea.

The 'brains' are interesting. Everything is clearly labeled in english for what it does. Things like CAP_SENSOR, LIFE, RELOAD or IR_RX so drastic mods would be pretty easy. The mount points for the attachments seem to be in parallel so they're likely only restricted by the plastic mount shape rather than the actual location. It would be interesting to see what would happen if you grafted a 3rd mount point on. Could you activate the tracker at the same time as the scope and launcher attachments?

Looking at the IR blaster (the opaque lens) and receiver (the black circle with the silver X on it)

The IR transmitter with the cone and lens removed.


I'm not doing much today, just changing some LED colors. the life bars are 3 red LEDs. Going to make them 3 different colors (well, specifically changing two reds out)

unscrewed them and soldered in a green and blue that I took out of some of my kids toys (sssshhh, don't tell! They were broken anyway). I would have rather done green -> yellow -> red but none of the toys had any yellow LEDs. I guess I could have gone white and then put a yellow film, but I'm just screwing around so what the heck.

First off, this Point-and-shoot camera stinks. Second, here's the two new LEDs in place. They're rounded on the top and the originals were flat, so I get a different light distribution in my new LEDs that isn't ideal. But it does work:

So now when I get hit, I lose blue -> green -> Red health bars. Some future mods I think I might do:

• Move the on-off switch to where the head phone jack is. The headphone jack location would allow me to turn it on and off one handed while gripping the gun.
• Try to get a mechanical switch to work with any of the buttons. In particular, weapon select would be neat to make into some kind of rotary or dial type button. A toggle switch for single fire/semi-auto fire, etc.
• Graft on some 'extra bits' to give the gun more profile relief. I can't for the life of me figure out why they made all these guns so flat. I have some plastic tubing and other ornaments I could put on the sides with some LEDs to spruce up the side profile.
• Paint job. I've been stalking the Nerf Modding forums looking for tips and pointers for how to paint plastic guns. So far I have a few ideas. I'll probably just go with basic silver and red to match the grip plastics

Next I take apart my scope and rapid fire attachments.