I apologize in advance if you get lost in this section – I lost myself several times while actually building the thing. I have no background in the math or theory behind electrical circuits, so most of my work in this section is somewhat-educated guesswork. Thus, my explanation, by default, will suck. Try to stick with me and hopefully we’ll get through this together!



I’ve got a few pictures, but I’ll try to explain it as well. Power comes from a modified four AA battery holder (it now has a wire stretched across one of the battery holders) that now holds three AAs, coming up to 4.5v of power. The positive wire goes to the first switch, which then goes to the color switch. This is where the mess starts. The positive power routes to the middle pole on the color switch. Blue is the left pole, and orange is the right. Here, the narrative pauses so we can see what all it’s gotta power and how it’s gonna power it.



The lights are 5mm LEDs from superbrightleds.com. They had great shipping time and great prices – it was far cheaper to get $10 worth of LEDs online that I otherwise would have had to pay over $30 for to get in hand from a store. On the negative leg of each LED, you’ll need a 68 ohm ¼ watt resistor in order to limit the power. Again, I got them online, but I don’t remember the retailer.



If you’re not familiar with CAT5 cable, welcome to the most amazing cabling ever for projects like this. CAT5 cable is basically four ordered pairs of cables inside a sleeve. Rip open the sleeve and you can pull out eight cables, each pair is neatly wrapped together and ready to use! They’re blue and white, green and white, orange and white, and brown and white. I used blue and white for each section of blue lights (blue for positive and white for negative) and, predictably, orange and white for the orange lights.



There are four sections of lights. The first is the hardest – it’s the section of lights for the barrel (which, incidentally, we haven’t covered yet). The barrel lights are arranged in an alternating circle of 6 of each color for a total of 12 lights. If you’ve got a breadboard, more power to ya – I used cardstock and stripped CAT5 cable. There are basically four rings of wire: orange positive, orange negative, blue positive, and blue negative. I wired the orange LED rings completely before I started on the blue ones and layered the blue rings around the orange ones, then wired one blue pair and one orange pair to the rings and to the color switch and the white wires to the black wire from the battery. It took about three hours to design and build – check out the pictures for more information.



That section will go into the middle of the barrel and shine out the front. The next two sets of lights are identical – two sets of four LEDs in a square, and two of each color in each square. This means that basically, it gets wired the same way as the larger piece, with one set of colored wires going to each set of LEDs. These wires then go back and get separated so the colored wire goes to the appropriate pole on the color switch and the white wire goes to the black wire from the batteries. Each of these four-light pieces will eventually attach to an end of the light bar in the core – having lights at each end will allow the light to spread evenly throughout the bar and it’ll look a lot better that way.



The fourth piece is much simpler: it’s just one LED of each color. This piece will get routed to the top of the large shell and is the indicator light on the top. As with the others, make sure that every LED has a resistor attached and is attached securely to whatever surface you’re working on, whether it be breadboard of cardboard or whatever.



If there’s someone who can explain this better in the comments, please do – you shall have my thanks for at least the next twelve hours!



EDIT: The electronics control panel and handle was pretty much hacked together at the time with the goal of creating something that worked, but wasn't necessarily pretty. The handle was made out of two random sizes of dowel rod found on the floor of the shop. The switch in the middle-ish of the plate is the power switch -- I placed it there to make it very easy to turn the gun on, but difficult to turn off. It's actually physically impossible to turn off the gun without shifting your grip first. The second switch controls the color and is activateable by moving your thumb from side to side on the switch.



Originally I had a nicely thought out plan of having two plates that screwed into each other so I could make the electronics panel removable so I could access the batteries, but the screws ended up stripping the plastic! In the end, it all just got superglued together :/