Qwerk Customization and Tekkotsu

Index Adding a switch Adding a bump sensor Adding an LED Adding raygun special effects Adding a range sensor

Adding Raygun Special Effects

Using an ordinary toy raygun that you can buy at the toy store, you can add exciting lights and sounds to your Qwerkbot. Simply follow these instructions:

Step 1

Disassemble the housing of the toy raygun, in this case it just took a philips head screwdriver.

Step 2

Locate the speaker and sound card. The best way to do this is to first locate the speaker, which is as simple as pulling the trigger and seeing where the sound comes from. Once you do this, the two wires attached to the speaker should lead you directly to the sound card.

In the above picture, the round object in the top left is our speaker, and the two red wires lead us directly to the sound card in the bottom right.

Step 3

Before you remove the sound card be sure to make a note of what wire is where. First locate power and ground, this is done by tracing the wires from the battery case. The wire attached to the top side of the battery(with a + symbol), is power, the other is ground. There should also be a third wire attached to the trigger, make note of where this wire goes on the sound card, and also whether it goes to ground or power on the battery case.

Step 4

Finally begin wiring the sound card to your Qwerkbot. First be sure that the power is acceptable. In our case we had three AAA batteries in the battery pack, which is equivalent to 4.5 V. In almost all cases this is close enough to the 5 V that the Qwerkbot gives out, so wiring power to +5v and ground to gnd is perfectly acceptable. Lastly our trigger was wired to power, so connecting it directly to a digital output(in our case DO2) is quite alright. Digital outputs on the Qwerkbot put out 3.3V's, but again this was close enough that the raygun effects still worked.

Done!

Now to access this in tekkotsu use the sample code linked to below.
RayGunDemo.h
QBotPlusInfo.h This file names the RayGunOffset according to which output it's on, be sure to change this to the output you used

Scott McCaffrey and Dave Touretzky

Last modified: Thu May 13th 2008