DIY Laser Turret | Part 1 The Hardware

hey everybody so today we're making a laser turret that you can control from your computer but first I bet you're wondering how I'm filming this I actually went out and splurged and bought a professional-grade filming rig you people think I have money ah [Music] all right first things first materials need a couple of these three DS I'm going to always sprinkle some of that on there somebody used to go it is one of these to go with one of these and body all right so a couple things about the materials about these servos you can probably get a cheaper plastic servo I just like the metal gearing inside also if you do make sure it comes with these shitty hand attachments we're going to need those for later these power sources you can probably find a lot of them just lying around your house you can use like your phone chargers a lot of them are 5 volts you just have to look on the side for output and make sure it says 5v and if you're having a hard time finding any of these components I have an Amazon affiliate link in the description if you purchase through that link then I get a small kickback which is nice because alright let's start by getting the laser shut up all you need for this is your pen your hot glue and your laser diodes so just plug your hot glue gun and we're going to need it for later all right so start by just carrying apart your pen we're going to be using this for the housing for the lasers so we're going to pick the ink cartridge out we're going to take that part out flip it around in this unless like piece here on the end or just kill and rip it out okay there we go alright that's taken care of let's just put that to the side okay so now we're going to take one of our power sources now your power source is almost definitely going to have a little connector on the end just cut it off I already did so what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to gently cut around the outer insulator and pull and we're going to try and expose these two wires inside alright now go ahead and just do the exact same thing for your red and black wires [Music] and okay so you should have something that looks like this all right well that's all prepped now let's go ahead and take one of our laser diodes and we have to do the exact same thing for these usually they have a little bit of metal exposed but what we want to do is get quite a bit and it should look something like that all right cool so now we're just going to connect up the wires we're going to do red to red and black to black or blue to black it's all the same so I would definitely recommend using a soldering gun if you have a soldering gun and know how to use it but for the sake of the people out there who don't own one or you just want to be speedy you know hot glue stick is everything okay so I just twist up the wires [Music] all right cool and so it should look like this now would be a great time to test if your connections working so just plug the power source in and you should see yeah just a nice little laser okay if your laser is working like - we can just get to hot gluing the wires there's a red one hot glue just going to wait for that to dry make sure that your wires are not touching each other or else it will short it out and you won't get a laser there we go it looks awful and we're just going to wait for it to dry alright now that everything's dried up we're going to fit the laser diode into the casing we made earlier so just feed it in there if you need to cut your hot glue anywhere feel free to as long as you just don't snip the wire all right cool there we have it and just hot glue this last part of the laser in there so that it doesn't come looks perfect and there you have it look it isn't he got a stupid-ass laser pointer all right so one last thing before we go into building the actual turret part of the assembly take one of these stupid head attachments it literally does not matter which one and we're going to glue it on to this side of our laser scanner preferably right in the middle make sure that this court that protruding out is facing outwards alright now that everything is dried you can see how it fits on your servo so that it can control the laser alright let's get started on the motor assembly but right before we do that don't shine anyone in the eye with this I don't know why I feel the need to tell you they don't tell you not to stab someone when they sell your kitchen knife it's just common goddamn knowledge all right for the motor assembly no we need our motors we need the other two power sources and we also need something heavy can ASSU alright so for the mechanical construction of the motors it's going to be very complicated so pay close attention is done and so you should be left with something that looks like this you can see where the laser fits onto the turret so the bottom one is 410 and the top one is four tilt and all we have to do now is wire it up and it should be good to go alright the wiring for this is actually mildly complicated especially if you've never worked with Arduino or anything before so I screw up a couple of things to help you guys here's what the connectors for your servos are going to look like you have three wires and then you should see a schematic on the screen there's a the yellow one that's for signal the red one is for five volts and the brown is for ground okay let's start out simple just take some of our jumper wires and plug them into all of these wire connectors for both servos and so you should have something that looks along the lines of this alright let's just put that to the side and we're going to grab a couple of our power sources just a tip if you guys have power sources like these which don't actually have the black and red wires you can just look and the wires that have this little white bar on them that would be the negative side all right so just go ahead and strip off the wire so that you have exposed metal I already did that so you guys don't have to watch me go through it alright so what we're going to do is we're going to attach jumper wires to each of these to make it breadboard friendly just so we can fit it on our breadboard and again I would recommend soldering these but if you don't have a soldering iron hot glue fixes everything so with the hot glue method what I'm just doing is bending this jumper wire like that and then twisting the copper around it and yeah you might need to apply a little bit of pressure with like a scissors or a pliers or something and then we can just hot glue that and I'm going to do this for every single wire [Music] Wow alright and now you have breadboard friendly power chargers alright so now that we have all the components we need it's kind of wire them all up this is by far the most difficult part of this tutorial so I'll include a schematic in the end in case you guys get lost what we start with a breadboard slay down the Arduino what our soup can in place and just press our power sources first let's connect the ground pin of arduino to the ground rail of our breadboard put that in there put this in the ground socket time to wire up our servos so let's put the signal wire of one of the servos in port 10 now we're just going to put the 5 volt wire of the servo somewhere in the middle of the breadboard and then we're going to simply attach the ground pin of the servo to the ground rail of our breadboard now we're going to take our first power source plug in the ground pin into the ground rail of the breadboard and since we want to apply power to this servo we'll plug in the 5 volts on this rail so that is applying power to the servo and now we're all done with one servo we just have to repeat that process for the second so I take my X turbo signal wire plug it into port 11 I'm going to take the 5 volt wire of my servo and plug it in somewhere on the breadboard pretty much anywhere as long as it's just in the middle now I'm going to take the ground wire of my servo and I'm going to plug it into the ground rail of my breadboard now I'll take my second power source plug the ground wire into the ground rail of my breadboard see how this is getting really complicated necessary here at least then I'm going to take the 5 volt wire of my power source and I'm going to plug it into the same rail this vertical rail as my servo I know that got a little confusing so here's a simpler schematic of the design alright that wraps up the hardware portion in this tutorial the second part of this tutorial is going to just be writing software that's needed to control it with your mouse from their computer it's going to be a lot of fun and I'm a lot better at explaining that than I am electoral stuff so stay tuned and if you want any more tutorials I'd be happy to do them just leave a comment if you want me to show you're going to go to this then I'd be happy to I am really liking the whole soup can aesthetic that this thing has [Music]

Channel: Michael Reeves

Views: 1,659,122

Keywords: programming, electronics, arduino, tutorial, educational, STEM

Id: ZpdvnHVIeyI

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017