Proton Pack Thrower Lights
In 2010 my friend Tony upgraded his proton pack's particle thrower to a resin kit. He built it well but didn't have any lights for it so I told him I'd hook him up.
I went with analog circuitry because A) I already had most of the parts sitting around and B) I didn't have much experience with microcontrollers yet.
After looking at reference I decided to do two of the three lighting states shown in the movie. At power on the light cap next to the clippard and the slo-blo turns on, the white light on top blinks and the lightbar oscillates up and down. Throw the activation switch and the grill lights come on and the light bar goes to full on. For those who don't know the 3rd state would have been firing where the orange light cap on the tip lights up and the barrel flashes.
With the sequences worked out I prototyped the circuit.
Once I had it working I let it run on a fresh battery to see what the life was like. It killed it in about an hour so I went back and lowered the current on some of the LEDs and added a second battery. I also put the lights that are steady on (the light cap and slo-blo) on a switch so they could be turned off to save power. It should run for a few hours now as long as the grill lights aren't left on for extended periods. Here's the final circuit diagram I came up with:
With a working circuit the next hurdle was shoehorning it all into the thrower body. If I was going to be doing a bunch of these I would look into having a board etched, as it is I just placed parts on a protoboard as I went.
I spent about an hour diagnosing shorts, mis-wiring, and a busted switch but eventually it all went together.
Here's a video of the lights in action:
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