Ghostbuster's Gigameter LED display

Thomas Lemieux (aka The Iron Man of Maine) asked me if I could help with the electronics for the Ghostbusters Gigameter. Video of it from the film is hard to come by, but it looks like this:

There is not much documentation about it on the web.There is a a 3D printable version at:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1046928

The electronics are pretty hard to come by though.

Thomas was a big help with my Proton Pack Design and helping him out was no problem.

I'm a Microchip PIC guy by trade. But these need access to limited compilers and proprietary programming hardware to make them work, and so I decided to go with a cheap (<$4) Arduino Nano clone. This is my first Arduino project.

I'm driving a pretty specific common anode display that I got from AliExpress. But the software is designed to make changing the pin drives very easy.

As it was a rush job, I never formally built it up, but tried it out on a breadboard:

The software picks a target value from 0-999 (unless its the same as the current value) and rapidly displays the current value as it seeks towards the target. As the current value approaches the target value, the count rate slows.

Here is a video of it in action:



And the software is available at: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1235666

Who Ya Gonna Call?

My wife and I have been invited to a 50th birthday party in February, but it's fancy dress....Movie Style. And she wants to go as a Ghostbuster.

This does of course mean that I'm going to have to make us a proton pack each:

Now I could buy a kit, but these start at around £500.

So, it's time to fire up the 3D printer and the CAD system.
There are excellent plans available online at the GBFans website. But these are traditional 2D drawings, and not suitable for 3D printing.

There are some partial parts available on Thingiverse...

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:302576 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:95635

But none of these are either full kits, or have the 'difficult' parts missing. So I decided that I'd have a go at making a fully 3D printable kit. The first thing was to make a CAD model of the pack from the 2D drawings.

From this I made each part printable. For example, the Crank Generator is split into top and bottom sections as it is a wide, tall part that would be rather wasteful of plastic if printed in one piece:

This is one of the largest parts I have printed. It came out pretty good in white ABS in my heated print chamber:

Another interesting part is the 'spinner' on top of the crank generator. These are large potentiometer style knobs from the '70s with the part number MS91528-3S2G.

Almost totally unavailable in the UK. So from limited 2D drawings online, I modelled and printed it:

Another old part is this PH25 can style resistor:

And after printing:

This is still a work in progress, and there are several more parts before it will be complete. I'm putting all the parts onto thingiverse as I go along.

All the parts are available here.