5 stage coilgun

and that's it, a short and sweet project. the end result of this is that I was able to get a 1/4" ball bearing to travel 14 inches horizontally with a 2 inch elevation of the barrel. not exactly the most stellar results, but i'm glad i did it, and as a proof of concept it works. 

the timing was kind of a pain, here was my basic setup

since I don't have any feedback, I just had to start with one coil at a time and move my way through, finding (roughly) what timing got me the furthest distance. I feel like the project could work better if I put even more time into getting the coils to fire perfectly, but i'm satisfied with the way it is now. 

and here's the coilgun is working!!!

onto the next project!

the circuitry for this project is now complete. Since this project uses relays to power the coils i decided there wasn't a good reason to keep the micro-controller and transistors on the same circuit as the coil's themselves. This resolved an issue i was experiencing where the micro-controller would reset for seemingly no reason. It did however add another set of batteries to deal with, but i can live with that. now all that's left is to work out the timing to fire the 1/4" ball bearings that this coilgun was designed for. 

so this is really a project that was born of boredom, i was sitting around one morning and i just wanted to do a project. so i took something I've tried many times. after a few hours of soldering i ended up with a buggy protoboard prototype that seemed to look right. I wrote the code for it in about 20 minutes and gave it a shot... and it worked! twice.... added some flyback diodes to every coil in the circuit and tried it again with better results. i drew up a schematic to illustrate how each stage is wired and how i have it connected to the micro-controller.

the micro-controller diagram is a bit messy, it uses an Lm7805 linear regulator with a 330uF electrolytic cap and a 22pF ceramic cap on the output. other than that most of the circuit real-estate is composed of the relay circuit which is above, each pin connects to the 2n5551 in its respective circuit. 

and that's basically all this mess of wires is 

also, the micro controller and the 2n5551s draw from different 5v regulators, the 7805 powers the micro controller while the collector of each transistor is powered by the Vout of a AMS1117. i don't exactly remember why i did it, but it's more work to fix it than leave it.