Coilgun - V2b II

Another little update...

I've connected the capacitors, soldered coils to thyristor circuits and mounted everything on the 'prototype'.
-Grinded one projectile to match the barrel within ~0.3mm diameter
-Optogate is fitted, might still need to cover the holes and barrel a bit better so ambient light doesn't get through.
-**ck the control panel, I'll just put a trigger to fire the first stage and the rest is automatic.
-Everything besides 1st stage trigger and battery is soldered.
-Mounted protoboards with a little slab of glue(Hopefully removeable if need be)

Need to:
-Connect capacitors in a better way and make sure charge wires gets attached along with the charge equalizer.
-Hook up a battery for the trigger and lm311 circuit
-Get a better camera
-Stuff.

Coilgun - V2b

Just a tiny update on the 2stage/~400J coilgun.

I've found a suitable barrel, 6 meters of it to be precise, and the coils are now done as far as winding goes.

What's left to do is:
-Grind the bullets down to fit the barrel
-Make holes for and mount the optogate
-Solder all the circuits together
-Wire up what's left without electrocuting myself in the progress
-Make some kind of controlpanel for this

Nightlight

Microproject this time, still waiting for a good projectile tube for the coilgun..

Either way, I got annoyed with not being able to see my analog clock at night and instead of choosing a sensible solution I decided to have a LED light it up.
At the same time that I have this low-current LED as light I don't want it to waste battery power by being on 24/7 so it needed some kind of on/off circuit.

First few ideas were based around the clock itself, to have it as a timer and manually set when to light and not, I quickly deemed this as unnecessarily complex for such a small project.

This lead me to the next, final, idea: Light control.
I'm using a phototransistor to 'measure' the light and then decide if the LED should be lit or not. The circuit got a draw of ~3mA(As far as I can measure with my budget multimeters) when lit and in the µA range when not lit, this should give quite a good battery life even on AAA batteries.

The entire circuit consists of 5 resistors, 2 transistors and a phototransistor and has so far been tested on breadboard and in Proteus. I'll solder this together whenever the mood strikes me.

Here's a schematic 'til I get it soldered together.