Aliens M41a Pulse Rifle (from a Nerf Stampede!)

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Combust

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"The M41A Pulse Rifle is an air cooled, fully automatic, short- to mid-range combat rifle. Made of light alloy plates, it fires 10x24mm Armor Piercing Caseless Rounds from a 100 round U-bend magazine in either semi automatic, four round burst, or fully automatic rates of fire. The magazines could only practically hold 99 rounds and were usually underloaded to 95% capacity to avoid jamming. The Pulse rifle has a small battery powered digital readout screen that displays number of rounds left in the magazine; the battery is located in the handgrip. With a retractable stock and an underslung 30 mm PN grenade launcher, this weapon can be used as a carbine and an assault rifle."
http://annex.wikia.com/wiki/M41A_pulse_rifle
PulseRifle.jpg


Ive decided that I want a Pulse rifle (lol) and will be made from a heavily modded Nerf Stampede (which fires fully automatically from clips). Whats more its almost the right size and shape to be compressed into the paper craft Pulse Rifle from the esteemed Jan Rükr from http://aliens.humlak.cz/aliens/aliens_papirove_modely/aliens-m41_gb.html. Anything that cannot be cut and trimmed will be covered and disguised as well as I can manage.

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Once i have finished pepping (Which im using to keep me occupied at night while i wait for the weekends to work on the Fallout 3 power armour helmet) i will resin and test fit the shroud to get a better idea of what needs trimming. Then i will pour resin into the shroud pieces, seal the hole then rotocast it to get a nice even amount of resin on the inside. The layout will be damn close once i remove the battery pack from the stock. This can be replaced with 4AAs somewhere later as well as making an LED readout and sound module.

(I have most of shroud parts complete but no photo as yet.)

Watch this space.
 

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Very nice. VERY, VERY NICE. It's about time someone did a conversion for the Stampede.
 
Oh the pulse rifle, one of my all time favorite sci-fi weapons. I swear from watching aliens to much and all the time I spent on the original AVP game I can pick out the sound of one firing from a mile away!
 
Go go Smartgun!
"Hey Vasquez have you ever been mistaken for a man?"
"No, have you?"
 
Quick update with most of the shroud peices finished:

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The upper area is mostly straight, the slight buckling can be sanded out. For the sake of completeness i will pep the entire thing baring the little knobs and dials etc. Ill add them to the body later.
 

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That's coming out really nice. Are you going to add the LCD counter as well, or just paint it in?

Indeed i will. A working counter with an IR sensor in the barrel (Although it may only hold 10 darts) and sound module will be added after its together. Eventually.
 
Indeed i will. A working counter with an IR sensor in the barrel (Although it may only hold 10 darts) and sound module will be added after its together. Eventually.

Yeah, if you so feel inclined mind posting links of the counter and sound module you get? It'll help my AR project out.
 
Oh the pulse rifle, one of my all time favorite sci-fi weapons. I swear from watching aliens to much and all the time I spent on the original AVP game I can pick out the sound of one firing from a mile away!

Doesn't it just tickle your innards when you hear of people making working replicas of this bad boy?
Sorry If I haven't read far enough in but I have a stampede. and I'd like to try this build too. Could I get a point in the right direction for a pep on this?

Wait sorry, I found the link, but I don't think you mention that it will not print or run through pep. I had to download their program.
Ok so the program they have won't run right on my comp or was their something you had to do to print out yours?
Would be nice to get a Smart Gun pep too.
 
Yeah, if you so feel inclined mind posting links of the counter and sound module you get? It'll help my AR project out.

Absolutely. I havent started that side of things but once i do ill post everything i use. It should be based around an Arduino microprocessor.
 
Doesn't it just tickle your innards when you hear of people making working replicas of this bad boy?
Sorry If I haven't read far enough in but I have a stampede. and I'd like to try this build too. Could I get a point in the right direction for a pep on this?

Wait sorry, I found the link, but I don't think you mention that it will not print or run through pep. I had to download their program.
Ok so the program they have won't run right on my comp or was their something you had to do to print out yours?
Would be nice to get a Smart Gun pep too.

Unfortunately there is no pep for this, its just a straight pdf/jpg of the cutouts. He said to size to to 90-95% to have 1:1 (Or something like that.)
 
Now before my update i just want to get this off my chest:

I HATE THIS PEP (Not really a pep but anyway... back to my rant.) I hate hate hate it. It took me 3 hours solid cutting and gluing this horrible thing!
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Resining the various pieces.
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Rondo poured into the bits, and on the whole it came out well. A few kinks but it will all need to be bondoed/sanded.
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Oh hey too much catalyst (On a hot day) causes lots of heat, a rather scary sound, and smoke :D Ill have to try this on a colder day as everything cured too quickly (even though the ratio was lowered to almost nothing).
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And after lots of small bondo hits and sanding, voila!
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To do list:
Find a Nerf recon/Longshot Front gun to hack into the 'Grenade launcher'.
Add more rondo to the main body.
Sand like there is no tomorrow.

Things not to do:
Add too much catalyst on a hot day. Ie be very mindful of the heat/ratio.

Things to be mindful off:
Resin and printer ink do strange things. The resin doesnt fully saturate through the ink so you have to resin/rondo the inside of things.

Cheers.
 

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Well ive made some progress (Mostly from favours called in for help with the code) on the Ammo counter.

I will be using an Arduino to run everything as the support and open source nature of it is amazing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino
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More specifically i will be using the Make, Hack, Void's Arduino clone, the MHVBoard.
http://www.makehackvoid.com/group-projects/mhvboard-arduino-clone
atmega328p_installed.preview.jpg


A few single digit 7 segment displays (Or a dual display):
LED2X7SEGLG_300.jpg


A few resistors, an IR sensor, micro switch and other bits and pieces.


The first version of the code was simple psudo-code that i managed to cobble together. It gives the idea of the behaviour, no matter how incorrect it is :D.
Code:
While clip_in = true
do
  Increment ammo to 95 quickly once.
    If fire_pin = true
      ammo --
      If ammo = 0
        Stop
      End if
   End if
End while.

After calling in some favours (Thanks Projectgus and Devdsp! You are both helping me learn by doing.) the following code was produced:
Code:
#include <seg7.h>

uint8_t ammo_count = 0;
Seg7 display1 = Seg7();
const uint8_t fire_pin = 18;
const uint8_t clip_pin = 19;

void setup()
{
 display1.attach(2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9);                // units
 display1.attach(10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17);  // tens
 pinMode(fire_pin, INPUT);
 pinMode(clip_pin, INPUT);
}

void loop()             // Main loop for all functions
{
 until_clip_in();
 count_to_95();
 while_clip_in();
}

void until_clip_in()            // Loop waiting for the clip to be inserted
{
 display1.write(0);
 while(digitalRead(clip_pin) == false) {}
}

void count_to_95()              // Increment ammo counter to 95
{
 for(ammo_count = 0; ammo_count < 95; ammo_count++)
 {
   display1.write(ammo_count);
   delay(100);
 }
}

void while_clip_in()            // Fire and decrement ammo counter
{
 while(digitalRead(clip_in))
 {
   if(digitalRead(fire_pin) == true)
   {
     ammo_count--;
     display1.write(ammo_count);
     if(ammo_count == 0)
       break;
   }
 }
}

Please note i am using the Seg7 library to control the displays:
http://blog.2of1.org/2010/08/27/arduino-library-for-7-segment-displays/
https://github.com/2of1/seg7/raw/master/README.txt

I will have to add a debounce section to the Fire_pin as when its triggered, it will trigger high/low very quickly then settle on high. Switch bounce.

More to come!

Let me know if there are any questions and how im going :) I tend to rely on pictures to tell the story.
 

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