Rick and Morty Portal Gun: Design, Implementation and Assembly

Rick and Morty Portal Gun: Design, Implementation and Assembly

Rick & Morty Portal Gun

I love Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty so, for Halloween this year, I created my own version of Rick Sanchez’ Portal Gun–including a 3d-printed enclosure, printed circuit board, negative energy density tube/crystal thingy, wave file player and laser.

Portal Gun Construction

Portal Gun: from design to finished device

Here, I’ll go over the design and construction, as well as a few lessons learned along the way.

First off, to get an idea of what it looks like and how it works, check out this spoof advert/demo of the project:

 

Portal Gun architecture and function

In the video, you can see the essential elements of construction and function.  In short, the device has two major modes: portal opening and universe selection.

A single control button is used that detects short vs long presses and reacts accordingly.  The entire thing is run as a finite state machine.  The original transition graph was:

Portal Blaster Finite State Machine

Portal Gun FSM

but I added a few things and simplified some others as Halloween got closer!  In short, there are only three signals used throughout the system: the short/long button presses and a “schedule done” emitted by one of the async processes (light show or wave file play, doesn’t really matter which, I chose to piggy back on the lighting routine end).

The hardware function is split into 5 independent modules:

  • LCD: support for 2 different types of display
  • Wave file player: support for 8kHz stereo or mono files
  • “Tube” lighting: 3 oscillating green and one “alert” red
  • “Headlight” lighting: 2 green and one line laser
  • Control Input: a pretty nice stainless steel MOM switch

all of which can run their own schedules/routines, and be told to sleep/wake by the hardware manager.

One of the options is to go into sleep mode, but the device will power down if inactive for a configurable delay (defaulting to one minute).

The portal gun is powered by a pair of AA batteries and everything runs straight off that voltage level, without regulation. In sleep mode, it consumes < 1 mA.  In normal operation, power usage varies according to how the lighting is behaving while in idle mode (somewhere around 40-50 mA draw) and while it’s firing (all lights on/flashing, laser on, sound playing) that shoots up momentarily to about 170 mA.

Construction

Construction of the portal gun involved designing a circuit and then building a case to hold it and support all the external components, as well as hold the battery.

This was my first CAD design since some minor initial testing, a few months back.  Thankfully, FreeCAD is a powerful open-source and free program that allowed me to quickly come up with this:

Portal Gun case design

Portal Gun enclosure design

 

The five pieces lock together precisely and a notch in the handle/battery holder keeps the body and handle together nicely when everything is bolted together. From there, it was a question of turning the design from idea to reality.  I looked into a few options here, but wanted something that would be quick and, ideally, local.  For that 3dHubs to the rescue!

3D Hubs allows you to find locals that offer 3d prints.  I don’t know if it’s always as smooth and all-around awesome, but I wound up working with JF Payeur’s hub and was more than satisfied with the result.

Portal Gun 3d printed enclosure

Once I had the case on hand and knew the PCB would actually fit in nicely, I populated the circuit board.

Portal Gun populated circuit board

The circuit is relatively straight-forward, basically just an MCU surrounded by a bunch of mosfets to drive the lighting and speaker, plus the support for two types of LCDs and a sprinkling of protection diodes and bypass caps.  I also have a few extra components laid out, there, that I didn’t have time (or need) to use right away (e.g. like external flash memory… I used an xmega128, so had tons of room for my wave files right in microcontroller).

The tube itself was made using plastic resin and LEDs poured into a suitable container, along with extra plastic for effect.  Watch the video above to see the neat result with the LEDs pulsing.

Portal Gun Negative Energy Density Tube

Not too bad for a dollorama spice bottle :)

Construction itself involved creating a bunch of headers to tie everything to the mainboard.  Not my favorite part, but at least it kept things more flexible than soldering directly to the PCB.

Finally: stuff it all into the box,

Portal Gun final assembly

Final Assembly of portal blaster

and take it out for a spin

Portal Gun out on Halloween

Rick Sanchez meets beings from other universes

Post-Mortem

Most of the lessons learned during this project involve the case design.  The most important of these are:

  • Leave more tolerance between parts that fit together;
  • Don’t count on small plastic extrusions to hold anything–they just snap off (e.g. my PCB sitting nicely on the pegs in the picture further up… yeah, that didn’t last);
  • Make the enclosure bigger than you think you’ll need–a few cubic cm of plastic can make your life a lot easier (e.g. I had to swap out the speaker for a larger one and that caused me trouble);
  • Don’t be too liberal with wiring: too much is as bad as too little, when you’re trying to stuff everything into a box;
  • Buy more headers, especially if you design such that parts overlap (e.g. the LCD’s constrast trimmer pot is… beneath it!  Not such a big deal when the LCD is removable, but I ran out of 1.27mm headers and yeah, not so much fun);
  • Make the damn batteries easily accessible!

So, a few good lessons learned, and at least as much fun making the portal gun as I had using it on Halloween (and every day since ;-) ).

 

 

 

 

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