Hi Hans,

I hope your luck with AliExpress will stay as long as possible

The "aim" (moving LED from each side of the strip) is already the charging. But you are right. The time it takes for the LED to travel the stripe is different. Maybe I can set the sound so that it matches most of the time. For me it is ok when the sound is off for a few milliseconds or so.

I don´t get what you mean with making the loop always the maximum and that the charge will then take a moment before the LED is showing. Do you mean to code the effect in a way that every single aim and shoot takes the same time, which will mean that for a long travel (shoot at the end of the stripe) the LED will wait for a moment before start traveling? So the sound is already playing a few milliseconds before the LED effect starts?!

My "workstation" is in the kitchen. That means I also have to store everything when I´m done. And yes, this is frustrating 

Your solution with the piece of wood is a good idea and saves a lot of setup time.

Hi Hans,

I hope your luck with AliExpress will stay as long as possible

The
"aim" (moving LED from each side of the strip) is already the charging.
But you are right. The time it takes for the LED to travel the stripe
is different. Maybe I can set the sound so that it matches most of the
time. For me it is ok when the sound is off for a few milliseconds or
so.

I don´t get what you mean with making the loop always the
maximum and that the charge will then take a moment before the LED is
showing. Do you mean to code the effect in a way that every single aim
and shoot takes the same time, which will mean that for a long travel
(shoot at the end of the stripe) the LED will wait for a moment before
start traveling? So the sound is already playing a few milliseconds
before the LED effect starts?!

My "workstation" is in the kitchen. That means I also have to store everything when I´m done. And yes, this is frustrating 

Your solution with the piece of wood is a good idea and saves a lot of setup time.

Hi Hans,

I hope your luck with AliExpress will stay as long as possible

The
"aim" (moving LED from each side of the strip) is already the charging.
But you are right. The time it takes for the LED to travel the stripe
is different. Maybe I can set the sound so that it matches most of the
time. For me it is ok when the sound is off for a few milliseconds or
so.

I don´t get what you mean with making the loop always the
maximum and that the charge will then take a moment before the LED is
showing. Do you mean to code the effect in a way that every single aim
and shoot takes the same time, which will mean that for a long travel
(shoot at the end of the stripe) the LED will wait for a moment before
start traveling? So the sound is already playing a few milliseconds
before the LED effect starts?!

My "workstation" is in the kitchen. That means I also have to store everything when I´m done. And yes, this is frustrating 

Your solution with the piece of wood is a good idea and saves a lot of setup time.

PS: Everytime I want to reply, I have to submit it several times before it get posted

Hi Hans,

I hope your luck with AliExpress will stay as long as possible

The
"aim" (moving LED from each side of the strip) is already the charging.
But you are right. The time it takes for the LED to travel the stripe
is different. Maybe I can set the sound so that it matches most of the
time. For me it is ok when the sound is off for a few milliseconds or
so.

I don´t get what you mean with making the loop always the
maximum and that the charge will then take a moment before the LED is
showing. Do you mean to code the effect in a way that every single aim
and shoot takes the same time, which will mean that for a long travel
(shoot at the end of the stripe) the LED will wait for a moment before
start traveling? So the sound is already playing a few milliseconds
before the LED effect starts?!

My "workstation" is in the kitchen. That means I also have to store everything when I´m done. And yes, this is frustrating 

Your solution with the piece of wood is a good idea and saves a lot of setup time.

PS: Everytime I want to reply, I have to submit it several times before it get posted

Weird a simple message works, but with inserted links, it doesn´t.

It only got "simple" with your help.

I think I will tweak the sound here and there a lil bit to make it fit a bit better. Without knowing, it shouldn´t be visible that the sound is a bit off in some situations.

But there is more to go. I mentioned a warp-jump effect earlier. Having the engines on a steady blue color and with a button push it will fade brighter, with a light blue/white flash at full brightness and fade down to its steady color. Some varibles for the brightness, fadeup time, flash time and fadedown time would be great, also adjustable color. I will try to achieve this by my own, but I don´t think I will get it working without your help.

Warp jump

And maybe I will also do a photon torpedo effect like this one (cause it is similar to the warp jump):

Photon Torpedo

But i think this will be a new topic right?

Have a good start to the new week!

It only got "simple" with your help.

I think I will tweak the
sound here and there a lil bit to make it fit a bit better. Without
knowing, it shouldn´t be visible that the sound is a bit off in some
situations.

But there is more to go. I mentioned a warp-jump
effect earlier. Having the engines on a steady blue color and with a
button push it will fade brighter, with a light blue/white flash at full
brightness and fade down to its steady color. Some varibles for the
brightness, fadeup time, flash time and fadedown time would be great,
also adjustable color. I will try to achieve this by my own, but I don´t
think I will get it working without your help.

Warp jump

And maybe I will also do a photon torpedo effect like this one (cause it is similar to the warp jump)

Photon Torpedo

But i think this will be a new topic right?

Have a good start to the new week!

Hi Hans,

had a lot of work the last days.

For the Warp Jump: Yes, the LED´s are set to a blue color, increase brightness to an almost white AND we have then a white short flash and decreasing brightness from almost white to steady blue again.

For the Torpedo: I think random shots aren´t that pretty. I would do it like the Phaser effect. One pushbutton and 3 or 4 shots, like a short burst. I like the idea of fading the LED brighter and brighter with a "vibrating" effect, then the LED have a short flash and no fade out, after the flash the led is off. The Klingons have a type of Torpedo which have a afterglow. The Federation doesn´t.

A friend has Amazon Prime. Maybe I can watch it there

Have fun with the sound modules. Im addicted to not have  just lights in my models but sound too

Well Amazon handled it the right way....and they made it even though it wasnt their mistake.

I
dont know if there are any regulations. But what I know is, that those
cheap lasers can be quite dangerous. Much more power than allowed, much
more powere than labeled and so on.

The idea of having a LCARS
interface is now about 20 years old. Back then I had no idea how to make
them. Even Arduino didnt exist. And then I found videos like the one
you have seen. You can imagine that my jaw doped. Someone is the same
kind of Nerd like Iam. hahahaha

And your idea of putting real lasers in, isnt new.....take a look at this video (about 1 minute in)

Real Phaser

There is no problem with location of target.....just put laser LED to every single WS2812 hahahaha
What
I dont like about the laser is that you need to have some sort of
protection. And even with this kind of protection, it is not save. To
make it save, you have to use a wavelength filter, but then you arent
able to see the lasers anymore and building a whole box made of
professionel laser protecting material is very very expensive and the
material is colored.
The other problem is the visibility of the laser. In Star Trek they dont shoot laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).....it
is called phaser. And it is a weapon which generates particles called
Nadions and it is a beam of heavily energized particles. Thats why the
whole beam is visible. With a laser, except for some dust particles,
the laser would only be visible at the diode and where the laser hits
something. Oh damn am I a Nerd.

Where do you want some lighting
for explosion? Are you thinking about putting the model in a box and
having some points (at the box) where it can light up when the phaser is
firing? This goes along with the idea of moving stars. We could put it
in a box with a black background. But then one side of the ship will be
not visible for viewers. How would you make those moving stars? Several
horizontal WS2812 strips and an effect that simulates those star
streaks?

Moving Stars

And you are a part of this project!

Well, something went terribly wrong with the forum and I have no clue what happened, besides a bunch of messages appearing 

My apologies for all the email notifications you may have gotten ... I really need to get rid of bbPress for sure 

OK, coming back to what I thin was your last message 

Yeah, I'm glad Amazon did the right thing ... but boy am I p*ssed at DHL.
Funny note: the day before and the day after my package was supposed to be delivered, my neighbor received each of those days a package from DHL sent by Amazon. Weird. 

As for forum posting issues: Are you by any chance using Internet Explorer or maybe temporary copy/paste in Microsoft Word?
In some post I see the usual Microsoft garbage (typically generated by MS Word).

The Real Phaser "laser" video - super cool! That is indeed what I wa thinking of!
With targets I'd then probably take 4 or 5 fixed spots and use those (not aiming at people ) and place lasers there.
But you're right; one needs to be super careful with lasers.

Haha, you know indeed a lot about the phasers - more than I do.
And yes, we'd need to figure a way to make it visible - which can be very difficult.
Not to mention we'd need a specific color. 

An idea for the explosion could be 1, 2 or 3 panels, where the panels are "black" - non-transparent (also great for the moving stars idea).
I'd define a few fixed locations where the explosion could take place and have that part transparent with the picture of a large explosion.
Then put a light source behind it and at explosion set the light to max brightness and quickly reduce the brightness to zero.
Not a real explosion (unfortunately) but it may gave a nice appearance as if it was an explosion.

I sure hope I explained that right hahah ...

Maybe this works better:

Take a glass sheet and "print" a large explosion on it (on the back) - the rest of the sheet should be painted black (on the back).
Now place the sheet in a box (which will hold the light source), so that normally the sheet would appear all black.

Anyhoo - just a thought 

As for moving stars; yeah that may be a problem.
I was originally thinking of using a laser for that as well - but quickly realized that "dots" (not moving) vs "stripes" (warp) would require a lot of mechanics to have the laser "draw" this.
An expensive alternative would be an LCD/LED TV screen ... hooked up to (for example) a Raspberry Pi.
We would have 3 stages: 
Standing still - static picture with stars.
Moving - looping video where the stars move slowly.
Warp - looping video (as seen in your example) where stars a "striping".

I did find a video playback shield ... ($14 here) but it requires a direct hookup to the LCD panel 

I think this may be way over my head haha - I did see this trick as well - using a Raspberry-Pi as a HDMI shield.
Expensive but could be used more like you're using the MP3 module: MedeaWiz DV-S1 Sprite.

Anyhoo - maybe I'm getting a little too enthusiastic and some of the parts will probably be too expensive ...
I still think using a Raspberry Pi (even the first model - super cheap) maybe a good way to go.
Trigger videos via serial port.

And again I can´t reply

Maybe it is one of these?:

´ ""

Yeah, something went really wrong with your forum. I wish you good
luck to figure out what happened and that you find a solution.

Is
there just one good delivery firm? No matter which one you get your
package delivered, one day or another, you will get trouble.

I
usualy don´t type in Word and paste it in here. This was just a try to
get the message posted. I thought maybe there is something wrong with
formatting, so I copied it to Word and then back again. As you have
seen, it didn´t work.

Your
idea with the explosion lighting sounds like my older idea of putting
my DS9 in a box with a picture of the wormhole with a LED behind it, so
it looks like there is a wormhole floating. But I more like it, when the
model is visible from every angle and all around.

Once I have
seen a model with the old Enterprise and another ship. Between those was
an frosted acrylic rod, which was then lighted with an LED. This way
the whole beam was visible.....but the rod also.

Without a visible beam, I think the explosion animation would look weird and maybe too much like a toy.

I
have also thought about a LCD. But again, one side (broadside) will be
invisible for the viewers. That still would look great in a museum or
exhibition. But as a model for home....I think it is a bit over the top.

But,
I have thought about those tiny LCD for Arduino to build it in a
cockpit of other models. But there is no "easy" solution for playback a
video by using Arduino. Or maybe you know a bit more about it?!

You can buy those things, but it is expensive.

And this will possible drop your jaw again:

Oh, the videolink was the problem. But sending it without text works.

The fist one is for the LCD animation for cockpits

The second is for jaw dropping

LCD