Gadgetory

so for those of you who follow the Linus tech tips Twitter and Instagram you'll already be aware that there was recently a crisis at our headquarters sorry sorry it's still a little difficult for me to talk about this but I became aware after returning from a brief absence that someone had been at my desk touching my things sorry excuse me so naturally at that point there were two avenues available to me the first would be calm measured discourse with my trusted employees about the importance of respecting one's personal space and possessions while the second would be to over-engineer some manner of mechanical deterrent that would give any interlopers a much-needed taste of justice so in the end I decided well let's just say this isn't a video detailing how to host a discussion about office protocol mass drop is currently featuring their exclusive k7 XX red headphones built by AKG learn more and buy one today at the link in the video description meet the enforcer out of the box the elite strike rhino fire is a fully automatic fixed point anti-personnel nerf gun with a 2.8 dart per second rate of fire and arc range of up to 81 feet and a 50 dart and munition drum capacity it's a beast in its own right but it only works when I'm around to operate it which means I needed to turn this hefty foam blaster into a fully automated motion detecting stationary sentry turret so to accomplish this we'll need the following three servos an Arduino a webcam and a laptop to coordinate at all not to mention some quick rewiring and just a touch of fine woodworking now in much the same way that you can't make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs you can't modify a nerf gun without first voiding the crap out of the warranty so step one then is to carefully mind you these things are over a hundred bucks disassemble the rhino fire our main objective here is to access the internal wiring but the lighter our gun is the easier will be for our servos to turn it and the aptly-named Rhino has a little more junk in the trunk than we'd like out of the box which means we'll want to remove our bulky trigger assembly not to mention the six D cell batteries that also have got to go once the gun is in pieces this is also a great time to give it a quick makeover doing it upright involves laborious ly sanding off all the logos then taping and painting in layers etc etc etc but that's literally as interesting as watching paint dry so we're going to skip over that with some video magic ah much better so as you can see we've removed some excess weight at the back pulled out the battery pack and isolated the internal switch that turns on the motor next we need to assemble the body of the turret that this will sit on this bottom box is where we install the webcam and laptop so it needs to be nice and roomy our first servo goes inside the top of the box and the gun bracket is mounted on top which allows rotation along the x-axis we want to keep the load on the servos as light as possible especially when at rest which means keeping the weight off of the moving components themselves now our first plan was to simply place this ring of ball bearings between the box and the gun bracket but during the prototyping stage we found that to be insufficient the wood was just too rough and the bearings were too small for this to be an effective solution so the way we solved that then was to layer the ring of ball bearings between some discarded CDs thanks AOL that we attached to the wood the CDs are the perfect size though some minor modification was necessary to make room for the servo and they're smooth enough that the bearings were able to roll properly greatly reducing the strain on our servos now that we had turn we needed tilt good news though the Rhino comes with a tripod mount already that is located close to center mass so we gently modified this to allow a dowel to be inserted the dowel fits into two ball bearings that are housed in wood panels on either side allowing for ease of movement since the gun isn't perfectly balanced we added some small weights until it required very little effort to tilt it up and down now our server all installed at the end of the dowel can tilt the gun more quickly drastically improving the ability of our sentry to track its target so with the wood frame built we next mounted the remaining servos the Arduino and our battery packs now while our initial plan was to wire the internal motor of the Rhino directly to the Arduino in the end we decided to go with a third servo and a 3d printed prong controlling a mechanical switch and with all of that in place we just needed to neatly wire it all together then hook it up to the laptop and webcam in the base and run the software that we downloaded from Project sentry gun Rudolf labs comm a super awesome open-source sentry project that you should totally check out by the way now I'll take a moment to give you guys a quick pro tip when you set out to do a wiring job like this no matter how small the project is or how simple you initially assume it will be pick up at least two different colors of wire red and black for positive and negative are pretty standard don't just get one color because you're confident that you can keep everything straight and you think green is pretty you will end up four hours deep into the project surrounded by hastily marked wires from five different motors in two different batteries in a hopeless tangle deeply confused and full of regret so so much regret alright let's get back on topic before our final test we've got one more housekeeping item our final job looks a little messy so hey can we get some of that video magic going on here I guess we're just gonna have to embrace the whole junkyard chic aesthetic thing testing time success I can now feel comfortable leaving the office knowing that my tools pens and prawns will rest unmolested of course for the majority of the time when I'm here I don't actually want this thing hovering behind me so I needed to find a way for it to pull double duty fortunately with the help of a little open-source facial recognition software it can be easily repurposed as an employee morale booster now that's what I call a motivational tool satisfaction 100% guaranteed nuts nuts we're a hundred percent sure you'll love it smell package they'll give it that so nuts calm is a family owned and operated company that has been restocking healthy pantries for what was it since 1929 they have more than three thousand products not all of which are nuts so we got some cashews chocolate-covered pretzels can you believe the brand expected me to make it all the way through this without making any jokes about eating nuts so in a nutshell nuts calm has lots of hard-to-find items including gluten free and organic ones they have a 100% satisfaction guarantee and if you check out the link in the description you can get four free gifts in a curated mini shop with your first purchase of $25 or more so go check them out over at nuts dot-com thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at Amazon in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out the latest video over on channel super fun you