So I got a bit distracted and ended up designing dual solenoid firing boards. They should withstand 40volts (of course I am not going to ever push it that hard) and be able to control 3Amps per channel. I aimed it at being compact while still being isolated from the receiver. The current board is .9" by .4" and completely isolated from the receiver. I am going to send them out to fab soon and do some destructive testing to find the true limits before I stick it into my ship of course. The code itself will basically fire one side when sent one direction from the tx, and then the other when it detects the other side. The dead zone in the middle is pretty large so I don't accidentally set it off.
They use rules that are essentially the 2015 MWCI rules. If you haven't yet, visit scrapcombatships.com and send Brian or Ty and email. They battle monthly (Just had their most recent event Saturday) and have build sessions after battles.
I have the rules, Jordan. I'll see if I can send them over in a PM or something. Ok, that didn't work. Try this link from my online storage: https://www.idrive.com/idrive/sh/sh/x7n7w3p5u5
So the first prototypes of my firing control boards have come in, please excuse the picture quality, my phone's camera is about as scratched as they come. They seem to function well. I still have to run destructive testing to ensure that they play nice with multiple solenoids. The second image is actually of the test board for the MCUs but it serves as a proof of concept for the board itself. I just got excited so I thought I would share the progress. If they work I will be overjoyed because they are sooo small but still dual firing.
So I have finally got settled back home for the summer. I have started working on the turrets. In the spirit of this build (Aka if it works redesign it anyway), I am starting from scratch. I am going to try to stuff as much of the firing mechanism into the turret housing as I can. My plans started out in cad looking like this: Basically the back block will be spring loaded and have a cable that, when pulled by a servo, will slide the back half forward and close the breech. From there I would simply pressurize the system and pressure would build up allowing the bb to force its way through the front oring (not shown) to act basically like a fast gun except without the pressurized magazine. It sounds like a long shot but started building a basic proof on concept and it worked out great. At 100 psi it is making it more than half way through 1/4" balsa at 3 feet away. I don't have anything else to shoot at right now but as a test I think it went well. I decided that wood looked really bad and shouldn't be my material of choice, luckily I'm 20 minutes from Mc Master Carr so I got some delrin to play with. As it stands it will fit inside the turret, of course the servo for closing the breech will be located else where. The main goals here are to not have a pressurized magazine or an accumulator. I will run a test later this week to see if one solenoid can fire 3 barrels.
Ah yeah should have mentioned that, going to build basically an airsoft magazine, gonna use air line to feed between the mag and breech. I have small magnets outside the breech to ensure only one bb can enter
