Making a Light Gun

What happens when you leave two people alone in a house alot?

When they have access to a large number of light up gadgets and dollar store toys, an old nerf gun...and they have an idea?

In my house, it results in weeks of cursing and electrical work :) For the NCR Ranger Cosplay (See right for partial costume), Boyo really wanted a gun. But he knew from the internet and from friends that there are a LOT of rules that exist for what is acceptable in a convention. You can't typically bring anything that actually fires a projectile (so nerf went out the window) and it has to fit certain guidelines.  So what to do?

Once the evil feline overlord and project manager got out of his lap he could look at the supplies he had available. For the annual Parade of Lights we had picked up a pretty good selection of random LED lights. For Halloween we had picked up some LED sound sensitive glasses. For no reason I can remember we had an old Deer Hunter Video Game rifle (Did we ever own this game and I just don't know it?).

An idea was born. Or at least conceived. It took some time (a Month and a half of work, probably 30 hours of actually doing it) to become reality. Time, sweat, blood, tears...more cursing than tears, but still!

The decision was made to take the deer hunter gun and spraypaint it so it wouldn't be ugly orange. Than the decision was made to add lights to it. Then to add sound (this failed as the dollar store gun's obnoxious sound sensor fried under the fierce power of two AA batteries). Then to add vibration. Then more lights. Then switches. And toggles (I am exaggerating for effect here, but not much) and more lights!

It's been a LONG time since high school shop class, and that never really covered this type of wiring. Thankfully google and the internet are there for people who are going to try anyways.

In the end, it looked awesome and made a great final touch to his costume for Galaxy Fest. He keeps implying there will be more done to it - so we will see if this is the end of it all.