Making a real Portal Gun from scratch

all right so Nvidia just released a version of portal with RTX on and it looks beautiful kind of makes you want to be able to hold a portal gun in real life so I decided to make it a reality this is my portal gun and it was built completely from scratch through the power of 3D printing some electronics and some guides I found online I was able to bring this iconic device to life in fact there's a few new features I made to improve upon the original designs this is by far the most difficult thing I've made yet so let me show you how it all went down foreign for last Halloween I wanted to have an aperture Lab costume complete with a portal gun so all I needed was to buy the portal gun replica released by oh they're all out of stock that's okay I'm sure they have a couple on eBay [Music] and that was the pain I felt when I wanted to plan this costume earlier last year and while I have a full-time job that pays the bills I don't make that kind of money so I decided I was going to build one myself I needed it to be able to light up switch colors and play all the iconic sounds thankfully there are some people online that already made some 3D printed Portal guns using some Arduino Parts working with and programming electronic boards isn't exactly my forte but I was willing to give it a shot I will link both of these in the description but huge shout outs to Everett for the initial design and assembly guide and to lunchbox 79.85 for creating a guide for all the electronics my entire make and the improvements will be completely based off of the incredible effort that these two put into making this project possible now back when I started planning all of this out I thought if I was building one might as well build two right cost benefit analysis and after spending over 80 dollars in filament and 150 hours of printing I ended up only making one look I was an ambitious boy in 2021 what can I say but a few weeks later even though everything's printed out there's still a lot of work that needs to be done see both the front and the back parts of these shells were both printed in two separate parts that meant that first you had to glue the pieces together then we get to the part that you have to repeat again and again rub in some wood filler with a dab of water sand everything down apply spray paint then rub and wood filler with water sand everything down apply spray paint rub and wood filler with water sand everything down break the sander and burn yourself hot hot ow oh my God apply white spray paint and look at that everything is smooth hides the seam and is finally a monotone white I even finish it off with a few coats of super glossy finisher now I didn't bother doing any extra post processing on the black Parts because it looked fine already and at the time I didn't know that you could get rid of plastic scuff marks from sanding just by using a little bit of heat from a heat gun now we get to the assembly and honestly Everett did a pretty good job of describing how everything fits together now as good as all this looks it doesn't provide any lights or sounds and this is where lunchbox steps in with the revised models and instructions on how to assemble the electronics also I highly recommend printing the stand it's perfect for when you're ready to display it anyways I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty about how the electronics worked and how everything's specifically wired up because that would be really really boring what is the hardest part about making videos about technology explaining it making them interesting and not boring okay the only thing I want to warn you about is make sure that you pre-measure your wires so that you don't end up with an entirely Tangled mess when everything's soldered together but I will give you a simple overview of how it all works this is the main board an Arduino Nano this is in charge of controlling all of the lights that includes the three LEDs at the front the Ring of LEDs you put in the nozzle the three changing colored LEDs for the middle tube and at the top it interfaces with most of the controls in the back and sends messages to the other main board the sound effect board this board is like a conductor in that it tells the speakers which sounds to produce and although this board can deliver sound directly to the speakers its signal is about as weak as an ATT customer going up north for the weekend end so we're gonna also need to connect this amplifier to get things so that's the basics of what the two tutorials guide you through however there's quite a few areas where I deviated or even improved upon the original design first there is a shortcut I need to address the instructions recommend using this bubbly acrylic rod in the center I thought it was a bit pricey it was more expensive at the time so I designed and printed out my own tube using clear petg the rod would have looked better though don't cheap out on this part but there are six other ways where I would say that I actually improved upon the original designs number six deals with how the back shell stays in place in order to access any of the electronics you need to unscrew this little back panel however this big old Shell in the back prevents you from doing the unscrewing meaning that this top shelf cannot be a permanent fixture so I decided to use some velcro tape I bought off Amazon so this top part could be secured into place and taken off when necessary yeah look at that works like a charm oh that's not good this meant that if I also wanted to use these black wires they would also have to be detachable as well in the original design there are these little telescope looking things that you're supposed to attach your cords to but these ended up breaking quicker than the new Pokemon games so instead I use my new best friend magnetism I took some old AV cables from an Xbox 360 for the cords and they were the perfect thickness for these rare earth magnets I attached to each end now the entire back is fully modular number five has to deal with the front nozzle in Everett's instructions it has you put in a full logo in front of the LED ring but I thought that would probably block out all the light so instead I printed out a clear layer of petg to diffuse the light and I think it makes for a pretty effective end result but thankfully someone recently redesigned this piece to have some light holes in it so go print out that one instead for number four this has less with me improving the design and more so me making the existing design fit better there were a lot of times where the entry holes just weren't big enough for connecting this collector piece into this generator piece I had to use this tool to basically carve and peel this opening like a Thanksgiving potato I recommend printing out some prototype parts so you can play around with the design sizes before you know spending 50 hours on a print speaking of things not fitting these LEDs need way more space than what the entry holes allow so if you don't want to modify the files yourself be ready to drill number three on this list goes to the fact that the instructions list the Arduino Nano but I instead use a knockoff Arduino micro which is considerably cheaper and still gets the job done however you'll need to look up the pin outs of both the Arduino Nano and the micro change the Arduino code to reflect this but if you're careful you should be fine now this next one is pretty minor and is a personal choice on the back of the portal gun if you press this button it actually starts to play the credit song Still Alive Now if you've been on the internet as long as me you might be a tad tired of the fandom's obsession with this song on Reddit if somebody makes the comment this was a Triumph without fail the rest of the comments will continue the song it's like a cult man it's it's like it's seriously like a cult so when I take this thing out into public I don't exactly want a bunch of nerds like me doing their own version of Christmas Carol so instead I put in the more up-tempo version from the radio that plays at the very beginning of the game no lyrics problem solved [Music] and for my number one Improvement we're gonna have to fast forward a full year okay now it's the end of 2022. I have three days to prep for a con I was invited to at the Wisconsin Dells and the portal gun has not worked in over a year it's just been staring at me this whole time foreign to pull everything apart and try to fix it [Music] unfortunately I left myself in a situation where everything is connected pretty permanently so any changes I make to the main board is not going to be easy peasy lemon squeezy it's going to be difficult difficult lemon difficult okay so to start things off I found some disconnected wires that needed resoldering which was no easy feat because I could barely see what I was doing but that was the least of my worries wait it's working [Applause] [Music] we are so close okay okay I'll never press that button again I promise so I decided to sleep on it until day two thankfully before work in the morning I came to the realization that it was a power issue see the main Arduino board and the audio board run off two separate USB ports if either of the devices aren't drying enough power the battery bank will stop supplying power to that USB port until you unplug it and plug it back in So when the audio board isn't pulling enough power for whatever reason it will try to pull Phantom Force power from the board which will make you believe that Electronics can in fact express pain what the hell this is after I turned it off turns out that this is actually pretty standard power bank functionality so I needed a solution and fast thankfully I ended up finding one this special always on power bank this one costs just a little over 40 but I'm gonna need to Fork over 85 dollars for this model because it's the only one that will arrive on time goodbye money okay it's day three let's plug this thing in and hope for the best it actually magically worked it powers on and off it even makes the iconic sounds and of course it plays that catchy tune with just the touch of a button let's hope that nothing implodes at the con [Music] we got this [Music] okay so I just got back from the con I'm pretty exhausted but how'd it go okay but in all honesty it was a really fun time a lot of people wanted pictures it was sometimes hard to get through crowds of people when you get stopped every two seconds but it was a lot of fun meeting new people uh some of the highlights included getting pictures with shell uh the tf2 Team monkey and I didn't get killed by homelander from the boys so you know that's a positive I'm kind of glad I upgraded to the more expensive battery bank because it actually lasted the whole weekend without me having to unscrew it and power it on and off so that was a plus and one of the only real issues I ran into is one of the arms on the front kind of started to break off it was still attached but I probably need to print off and replace some new ones for that but I think that one of my favorite things at the con was all of the elevators had no music so I got to supply my own [Music] foreign thanks for watching attention viewer if you wish to avoid being subjected to further testing I suggest subscribing to big recreates now it will suffer the consequences the choice is yours

Channel: BigRig Creates

Views: 152,340

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Id: 6XYGeeG00aM

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2022