The electronics portion of the guide is rather tricky and frustrating, but to make things easy, I'll present it in layman's terms where applicable and word it in such way that an amateur can easily program/build it with simple easy-to-find pieces. The Mk. I design of the gun used an incredibly crude electronics portion: I purchased a cheap Radio Shack sound record/playback module, slightly modified it, then rigged it into a parallel circuit with a homemade 555 IC "one shot" LED blinker. In other words, when pulsing a pushbutton, the sound module would play a sound effect of the blaster pistol, in addition to making a single LED flash on for one second. The whole thing was powered by a 9V battery, and due to my then miniscule electronics savvy, I was unable to have the project power down -- thus the battery died after a few days. I've since then greatly improved my electronic abilities and began coding with Arduino, and as of now -- after numerous experiments -- I've developed a tiny barebones audio circuit for playing small sound clips off of a single chip. The overall premise of this barebones sound player is just the barebones Arduino, which has only the basic elements of the aforementioned circuit, such as the ATmega32 chip, the voltage regulator, few resistors, capacitors, and oscillating crystal. This circuit has some additions like terminal sockets for connecting the batteries and speakers, and also a small area with a transistor for amplifying the speaker. I programmed this chip using a tutorial I found online called "Arduino as an ISP", which uses the actual Arduino's function to upload code on standalone chips on a separate breadboard. Then once the chip was programmed, I placed it into my barbones Arduino on a breadboard circuit, and with some minor tweaks I succeeded in blasting the sound with pushbutton pulses!

This is an evolutionary design I've been working on for quite some time, mostly through trial and error, as well as countless failed experiments with physical electronics in addition to the code itself. The function of the code is to keep the chip in a power down mode by default to save battery life, and when pulsed with a momentary pushbutton, the LED blinks for about 1 second as a small audio clip plays. The blinking LED is a slightly modified form of the preexisting Arduino LED blink code that comes standard, the sound blast is a modified version ofthis particular code for playing PCM wav clips, and the sleep mode was modified from this tutorial I found. Most of what you see in this circuit I've made was strictly by trial and error and messing around with delay and loop functions in my code. For instance, I'd follow various tutorials verbatim, but would have failed results such as the sound output being quiet/muffled, the LED not blinking, or the transistor heating up. With many countless hours experimenting with various component parts and discovering how they work, I've succeeded in programming a standalone chip with the functional code, and developed a small sound player with adequate sound output. Although this circuit works perfectly fine for me and contains no errors in my various tests, If you're an electronics expert and you've noticed some issues with the layout and/or some parts which should be adjusted, feel free to point them out. For example, I'm using a 2N2222 transistor to output the sound in conjunction with a few resistors; although the sound plays just fine and the parts don't heat up, you might say to yourself, "Baron, you probably ought to replace the transistor with model# XXXXXX and use a resistor with fewer Ohms for cleaner sound!" or perhaps you might notice an error in my code. Again, although both the code and circuits function properly as intended, I'm not an expert, so if YOU are an expert, I encourage you to make suggestions and corrections where applicable -- that's what the comments section is for!

Please note: some of the blaster photos are inconsistent with the electronics parts I've assembled. Long story short, my breadboard circuit and first draft soldered chip were made when I assumed I could fit four AAA batteries for 5 volts to power my project -- hence I included the voltage regulator and 10uF capacitors to step the power down from 6 to 5 volts, and I included a transistor in series with resistors to make clear sound. After I soldered the whole chip based on my breadboard design, I learned that I could only fit two AAA batteries, so I had to remove the voltage regulators from the design, but at that point I still had the transistors and resistors soldered in. My final circuit is almost verbatim to the barbones "Arduino on a Breadboard" circuit from the link above, with the voltage regulator omitted -- but still retaining the 16 MHz oscillator, microcontroller, et alia.

