Launch Vipers! - just about done

[Will Vale]

Hi folks,

Our club is running its annual Build-the-Same-Kit competition and one of the nominated models was the BSG Viper. Luckily we got enough votes and there are now four of us building them.

I was going to do the new Mk. 1, but I found a cheap Mk. 2 so I thought I might try and build both.

So far I've washed the sprues (long soak in warm soapy water, then clean with a toothbrush and rinse) since they felt greasy. They still feel not quite right, so I think I might give the sub-assemblies another wash before priming.

I've done a tape-assisted dry-fit of both kits, and the difference is not quite night and day, but certainly pronounced. From my limited experience with Moebius their CAD is quite good, but the tool making and moulding quality control is so-so. So once you get the parts cleaned up they fit, but cleaning up can be a pain. The Mk. 2 engineering is a bit wacky too - too many interlocking bits.

The Mk. 1 however is really good - great fit, much less clean-up required, and the way it slots together in paintable sub-assemblies is fantastic. It's also got a bit more presence than the Mk. 2 and better surface detail.

I'll take some pictures tomorrow, then I need to start cleaning things up properly. I'm going to do the Mk. 2 in flight, and be brave and deal with the split-down-the-middle gear on the Mk. 1.

I also have the Paragrafix sets (not really essential but I wanted to try them) and a very nice resin Starbuck/Apollo figure from the original series.

The aim is to rig up some nice interactive lighting using cheap microcontroller boards, will see how that turns out.

Cheers,

Will

[Will Vale]

I finally took some pictures! Sorry, that was a rather disappointing first post...

You can see how much bigger the Mk. 1 is compared to the new version.

I also assembled the wings and undercarriage for the Mk 1. and started making holes in the cockpit for the etch/lighting gels. Not sure how to do the thin slots they require though - maybe chain drill and try and get a tiny file in there?

The fit is great on the Mk. 1, I've glued the cylindrical bits together and there's loads of room inside, plus the intakes, exhausts and nose section are a push fit into the body. I should be able to leave the engines loose so I can put the batteries inside and not have to run any external wires.

My electronics arrived too - I bought a couple of $8 Atmel boards (with limited pinouts) and daisy-chainable RGB LEDs with built in drivers and latching inputs. This lets you drive a great long string of the LEDs with only one pin on the microcontroller.

With these I hope I can build a better-than-most-of-what-you-can-buy lighting rig for about $20 all in. Although it probably won't have the super-bright 1W LEDs to mimic the original series Xenon lamps in the engines, which one of the commercial kits does.

Cheers,

Will

[Madhatter]

That's a great idea for a club activity Will. Good choice of build too.

I've built the MK2 before and know what you mean about the feel of the surface. In the end, I put it down to the low grade plastic it's made of as I couldn't get rid if the greasy feeling after repeated attempts to clean it. However, after a coat of primer, it's fine.

Where did you get your boards from? I'm trying to locate some micro controller boards here in aus but getting no joy, and I don't link buying online without being able to gauge physical size first.

Look forward to seeing this come together. With your paint skills, I think you'll turn this into a work of art as usual

Si

Edited June 16, 2014 by Madhatter

[Will Vale]

Thanks for the vote of confidence, and glad to hear the plastic turns out OK. We'll see how it goes, I'm a bit concerned about cleaning up the two-part landing gear, I think I'll probably end up cutting off some of the detail and remaking it instead.

I got my boards from Adafruit in NY - they have measurements on their site, and shipping to NZ was reasonable (and quick). I've also bought from Sparkfun with similar results. I'll put some pics up when I have some more modelling to post, or maybe if I can get the LEDs wired up

The one I'd recommend for starting out is either a genuine Arduino, or some variety of Teensy. The Teensy is small, cheap, more-or-less Arduino compatible so you can use the Arduino IDE, has built-in USB, and loads of pins. I'm using a Teensy++ 2.0 in my (stalled) Yamato:

That's standard 0.1" pitch veroboard on either side.

Will

[Will Vale]

Got a bit further. The rear body is together now, and needs a little bit of seam cleanup on the rings. I also assembled the wings and fin last night and left them to dry. I clipped away the locating pins which lock the wings into the stubs on the body, so they can be painted and decalled separately and just slotted in place - much nicer. It also means it's possible to address the seam facing the engine properly.

Today I hacked out (chain drill, scalpel, files) the rest of the cockpit for the etch and cleaned it up with a scalpel and Extra Thin to get rid of the last bits of swarf:

Then I fitted the etched parts with 5 minute epoxy, the front panel first. They ended up a little bit high, but that was where they seemed to want to sit, so...

I filled and sanded the seams on the fin and started on the wings, but then got distracted and decided to get the engines together. This meant dealing with the clear insert - I know this is supposed to be a good idea but it seems weird to me - the insert has all this detail which should be opaque, and is basically impossible to paint, so the etch replacement is handy.

You still need the insert to get the etch in the right place and provide most of the engine tubes, so I opted for the brave-and-stupid approach and drilled out the backs of the nozzles with a power drill and a big spade bit

I shattered the supports but the tubes were OK, and after a good hour of sanding starting with 80 grit paper I ended up with this:

I also sanded the flat backs of the tubes to about 2/3 thickness to allow for the thick brass, otherwise the whole assembly won't quite fit tidily over the engines.

I also took the promised picture of the worky bits:

The microcontroller board is on the left, and the break-off strip of RGB LEDs on the right. These need a 3 wire daisy-chained bus so they should be really easy to set up, and there are biggish solder pads on the backs of the PCB.

Cheers,

Will

[Madhatter]

hmm - that;'s an interesting looking board you have there

If you wouldn't mind, can you get a shot or 2 of it wired up so I/we can see what goes where?

The PE inserts look very flat (obviously - they're PE) and I wonder if the studio model would have looked like that. Is there anyway to build them up a bit to give them more of a 3 dimensional appearance?

[Will Vale]

I'll post a pic of the lighting rig when I have it together, sure.

I agree about the inserts - although afterburner flame holder rings can be quite flat, they usually have at least a couple of layers (e.g. rings in front of bars). The studio models probably don't have anything there apart from reflectors for xenon lamps, but I don't know about the full-size mock up.

I did wonder about adding some longitudinal ribs inside the cans, that would be easy and might be quite effective. I'll see if I can find any pics (still waiting for the Blu-Ray to arrive...)

Will

[Ravens]

Looking good so far; are both of those vipers the same scale?

Ross.

[Will Vale]

Yes they're both 1/32, I was surprised at the difference in size!

I built the lighting rig and I'm about halfway through programming it at the moment:

There are four white LEDs wired in two pairs for the cockpit side panels, an RGB LED for the main cockpit display, and three RGB LEDs for the engines (with a plug and socket so I can take that bit off if needs be.)

Cheers,

Will

[Ravens]

Yes they're both 1/32, I was surprised at the difference in size!

Will

That was my first impression too! Despite having watched both series of BSG in their entirety I'd never actually compared the old vipers to the new.

Ross.

[Madhatter]

Yes they're both 1/32, I was surprised at the difference in size!

I built the lighting rig and I'm about halfway through programming it at the moment:

There are four white LEDs wired in two pairs for the cockpit side panels, an RGB LED for the main cockpit display, and three RGB LEDs for the engines (with a plug and socket so I can take that bit off if needs be.)

Cheers,

Will

Thanks Will. I'm going to be cheeky and ask if you could rotate the unit and zoom in on the wiring? I'cve never actually used or seen this kind of unit and am interested to see how it works

Thanks mate

Si

(edited due to a silly spelling mistake)

Edited June 18, 2014 by Madhatter

[Madmonk]

Great start Will,

The Vipers are really nice vehicles and not too difficult to light up. I used an Arduino programmer and an 8 pin ATtiny85 chip for the Mk2 and Mk7s I have done. Even got some flicker on the engines as well as flashing lights in cockpit.

The PE cockpit set looks very nice.

Keep up the good work.

Cheers,

Warren

[Will Vale]

could rotate the unit and zoom in on the wiring? I'cve never actually used or seen this kind of unit and am interested to see how it works

It wouldn't help owing to the way I built it - the wires enter the veroboard between the standoffs that the Trinket PCB is sitting on. The idea being to prevent them from being waggled and getting broken, the downside being you can't see anything useful apart from solder blobs.

I drew you this schematic instead:

Caveat: This is a poor diagram of what may be a poor design, I'm not an expert! D1 is to allow USB power when plugged in since I was running the batteries down too much, and C1 is recommended by Adafruit to absorb in-rush current from long strings of pixels. Probably not needed here but I thought I might as well do it properly since it's being stuffed into a model where I would like it to remain.

I also forgot to add a resistor (I think I used 330 Ohm) from pin 2 to the first "pixel"'s data input. This was also recommended by the vendor.

The other LEDs are just driven by spare pins. It's probably better not to use pins 3 and 4 since on this board they're part of the USB interface and they seem to make it slightly less reliable. Not that it was very reliable on my PC anyway - it only connects every other time, although once connected I haven't had any problems.

<NERD WARNING>

I finished writing my software today - I like coding for these little machines, this has half the RAM (512 bytes!) of a ZX-81, which was my first computer. Although it does have about 5K of flash available for program code and constant data.

I did some experiments with writing custom code for the LED animations, but decided it would be better to write a keyframe animation system instead. That lets me define the animation colours and timings in data, and then have some glue code to decide when to trigger which animations, and tie all the results to the outputs. I also added a couple of basic signal generators for the pulsing and flickering stuff and used those to modulate the animation outputs in some cases. It's quite compact - a keyframe is 4 bytes (stored in flash) and the state required to run an animation is something like 6 bytes. All the maths is 8 and 16 bit integer for speed, accuracy but mainly reduced code size.

<END NERD STUFF>

And here's the result:

https://flic.kr/p/nKCpTo

Sorry the video is so dark, otherwise the light was washing out the LED animation.

The viper cycles through four stages - "off" (flashing red LED), "start up", "run" and "shut down". The engines are lower right as I'm sure you guessed, the four white LEDs are the cockpit panel backlights, the lower single LED is for the main display backlights, and the two overly-bright red + green LEDs top right will be feeding single lights in the cockpit via fiber optics.

I thought having something flashing would be a good idea so that people would look at it long enough to see the sequence start if they arrived in the "off" part.

I used an Arduino programmer and an 8 pin ATtiny85 chip for the Mk2 and Mk7s I have done. Even got some flicker on the engines as well as flashing lights in cockpit.

Cool stuff, I haven't progressed beyond the prepopulated boards yet, but I agree it would be cheaper/better to make some PCBs and program the chips directly. Did I get it right that you're using the Arduino (and pogo pins or a socket?) as a programmer, so you load code to the Arduino via USB and it writes the flash on the ATTiny? That sounds look a tidy way to do it.

Cheers,

Will

[Madhatter]

thanks for the diagram Will - it made perfect sense to me.

I've been looking online a lot lately about these PIC Micro boards and was wondering why I would actually use one in a kit, but now I can see what kind of applications it has. I found one program that works like a flow chart and seems to be very easy to use. I am a complete novice/no kinda idea guy when it comes to programming language. My only experience with coding was back in college when it was all DOS based. I wouldn't have a clue about it now unless I devote some serious study time to it.

What other kind of applications would it be good for in kits (especially sci-fi) aside from the ability to turn on/off lights at set intervals or in a sequence? I read Warren's post that you can use them to induce a flickering effect which would be great if your making something look like it's burning.

Do these boards come with the relevant connectors to the PC via USB or do you have to buy them separately?

Sorry for the 101 questions... you and Warren are peaking my interest in expanding my lighting

Si

[Will Vale]

The boards which have USB use standard cables, and usually don't come with anything, but a lot of people have suitable cables lying around.

If you're not a programmer or electronics buff already I'd suggest starting with an Arduino "kit" which should include the board, maybe a DC power supply, cables, components, breadboard and usually some step by step lessons about how to wire stuff and how to program it.

You might've seen it already, but I went from wiring model railways (i.e. making sure red electricity and black electricity get to the right places yet never meet using switches, plugs etc.) to doing this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/willvale/7419436250/in/photostream

on the back of one of those kits, although my day job is "games programmer" so I was in comfortable territory for that side of things.

You can do tons of stuff, basically. The viper has engine lights which pulse and shimmer, smoothly change colours, etc. My unfinished Space Battleship has turrets that turn (servos), amplified audio, lights and it's all controlled by an infra-red remote I had lying around. Spinning radar dishes would be doable too, and I'm sure there are lots more cool things out there waiting to be tried.

I was wondering (but don't really have any pins left to do it with) about having a light sensor or IR diode and receiver on a display so that as someone comes near it can start playing whatever sequence you want

Cheers,

Will

[Madmonk]

Will,

I bought a basic Arduino kit as you have just described to Si. I then use that to programme the Attiny chips using a breadboard, then build up the individual circuits on veroboard. I tend to use the Attiny85 which is an 8pin package with 8k of memory and has 6 configurable IO pins giving digital IO, analogue IO and a couple of PWM outputs.

I'm no computer whiz by any stretch though I do have an electrical background but there is plenty of help and assistance out there.

Cheers,

Warren

[Will Vale]

Yes that's the same chip that Adafruit have packaged up in the board I'm using, you can see the IO pins although in their design one is hardwired as a reset pin. There are also two shared with the USB interface, but they're still usable.

Do you use the Arduino environment to produce your binaries, or are you using avr-gcc etc. directly? I find that Arduino support stuff eats a good chunk of the 8K flash.

Thanks,

Will

[Madmonk]

I use the Arduino programming software to write the code, then use ArduinoISP to load it onto the Attiny85.

The Viper MkII programme uses 2064 bytes, the Hawk Anti-collision strobe programme uses about 1080 bytes.

Writing the programmes without the Arduino is a bit beyond my capabilities.

I have written one for the Revell D7 Klingon cruiser moving from impulse to warp in 5 min intervals using the Attiny85 which takes up 1980 bytes which did surprise me as it is far more complex than the Viper!

Cheers,

Warren

[Will Vale]

Some of the Arduino library functions are a bit on the big side, so you might have a simple program calling a particularly large and complex function vs. a complex program which uses simple functions. If that makes any sense? The compiler can also unroll loops, inline functions and do other stuff which changes the code size quite a bit, usually in the name of speed.

I took a slightly better video which hopefully shows the lighting and the components at the same time:

Will

[Madmonk]

That looks fantastic Will, love the engines.

Cheers,

Warren

[Will Vale]

Thanks!

I've done some more modelling and built some luminaires for the engines which I forgot to take a picture of. They're a bit ragged but they work - a cone of styrene added to a ring of same, painted silver inside with PVC sheet frosted with sandpaper to finish. I was going to install them but I think I need a ring between the etch and the PVC diffuser to give more depth.

I also boxed in the cockpit footwell, butchered the unnecessary fuselage locators around the cockpit to create room, and added ledges for the side panel LEDs. Then I thought about painting the interior but decided that a seat cushion was a good idea. Lots of messing around with Tamiya epoxy putty later:

I haven't tried rolling putty into sheets before - it works really well but it's hard to cut without dragging and tearing it. It was also rather difficult to handle the belts once in place, but for a first try I'm quite pleased. The fabric texture is from a bit of etched tread plate which was lying around, I really hope that when painted it doesn't scream its origins too loudly...

Then I sat up till 2am last night sticking tiny bits of etch onto Captain Apollo:

This is an MMI resin figure which appears to be a case of "nice master, terrible casts". Although the heads are pretty clean. The surface is ragged and had seam holes rather than seam lines, plus the shoulder joins were messy and needed a lot of filler. I've made new shoulder pads to try and replicate the original uniform jackets.

The etched stuff is really good though - the belt, jacket + boot fasteners etc are lovely and crisp.

I think the sculptor maybe isn't a fan of the male posterior as Apollo had a huge gouge out of his buttocks - it looked like it was supposed to be a fabric fold, but any '80s sci-fi hero worth his salt should have a tight pair of trousers, so I filled it in.

The advantage of the (fairly terrible) surface texture is that my messy additions don't detract too much. I need to smooth it all off before painting and re-priming, I suspect either a Milliput wash or thin CA would help.

Cheers,

Will

[Madhatter]

I think they did a pretty good job on the face though - I immediately recognised who it was, so that has to be a plus - even if his backside is con-caved

Great job so far on that pit too - those cushions and belts really look good and comfy

[Will Vale]

Thanks! I agree about the face, it's a highlight of the model. The resin is horrible, flaky soft and I keep finding new pinholes. And those bear paw hands!

I cleaned up the surface with CA and I think he's ready for a tiny bit more sanding then paint. The primer has filled in the face a bit, or maybe it's the more diffuse light? I'm really looking forward to seeing the uniform colours on him now.

Bit boring from behind now, but I'm telling myself that what I've filled in are essentially tooling marks rather than sculpted detail. And his bum is an improvement, I think

I also primed the cockpit which needs a bit of remedial sanding tomorrow when it's thoroughly dry. It might've been better to do this with the airbrush, but then again all the bouncing paint would probably have made it end up rather rough.

Cheers,

Will

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Oh wow.....How did I miss this?

In for the duration now I've found it!

[Will Vale]

Thanks for the interest! Two weeks until the deadline today - ulp! I got seriously distracted painting this fellow:

more pics on BM

But I am back on the case now! I picked this up again yesterday afternoon and evening, painting some of the prepared bits.

The cockpit is in Kure Arsenal Grey if I recall correctly. If not it's the other one (Sasebo) and the panels are painted Sky Grey or Nato Black. I also primed the outside of the cockpit and the inside of the fuselage black and then added Nato Black to hopefully help with light bleed and also make sure the little bit of interior visible isn't plasticky.

I also gave the panels a couple of coats of Klear in preparation for washing. I'm considering cutting up some decals and applying them since Paragrafix didn't bother to provide anything (they did for the Mk. II) and the Viper cockpit is actualyl pretty busy with labelling.

If I do, it'll just be a suggestion.

Still need to brush-paint the seat and harness as well. And possibly do something about the rather poor joystick shape which doesn't capture the cobra-headed Viper joystick at all. Apparently the full-size "pushing buttons" cockpit used a joystick from a Mohawk - see Joel Owen's informative site for more.

The other things I painted were the intake fans, which are invisible as far as I can see (from the pilot at least) on the filming miniature and the full size prop Viper. They always appear as blackness - maybe the Blu Ray is too contrasty?

I went for Alclad Aluminium on the boss, and dusted Steel on the blades. Both over Alclad Black Primer (not gloss base) which went on pretty smoothly.

I made stand-off rings for the LED fittings from 1mm strip formed around a wooden spoon handle - these lift the diffuser off the back of the etched ring to create a bit more relief. I attached them with gel CA and then ran a fillet of thin CA around the outside.

The engine assembly had a couple of coats of black primer and looked fine, but when I went to spray Jet Exhaust in the nozzles it revealed a load of sanding scratches. I've wet-sanded all the paint off the inside of the nozzles with 400 grit paper and I think it'll be OK now - the absence of black on the clear parts suggests I got rid of all of them.

Having seen it on, I'm not entirely sure Jet Exhaust is the right colour either - maybe just matt grey and black with some streaks would be better?? The miniature Viper just has a glow in there so maybe the interior was a reflector or a white tube, but I can't do that because I want to show the engines off as well as on.

Not sure I can do anything tomorrow (it's my wife's birthday, lots to arrange for the party) but hopefully Thursday is going to be a modelling day since I'm off work this week. (Up to now Mrs. V. has been away so my spare time has been limited by looking after young Miss V.)

Cheers,

Will