#adafruit
We want to give a shout out to Adafruit for featuring us on their website’s blog. We couldn’t have built Wheatley without all the help from them and the wonderful folks on their forums.
We’ve started building the Portal Gun!
The pi-zero, arcade bonnet, the home-made remote control, and battery for the pi-zero and portal gun lights, must all be mounted inside the portal gun. Everything is controlled with a Pi-Zero W attached to an Arcade Bonnet from Adafruit. The Pi-Zero will connect to the Pi in Wheatley over Bluetooth. Actions and animation will be selected using the custom built “Hand” control that connects to the Arcade bonnet. The hand control will have a joystick and select/enter button along two buttons for firing the portal gun. Everything in the Portal Gun will be powered by a single cell LiPo battery with a USB up-boot power supply / charger.
We’ve blown up of a drawing on a Portal Gun and calculated additional dimensions to begin the build. The pipe we’re using to fabricate the Portal Gun is PVC. However, we need some flat PVC for internal components and maybe we can form the PVC for the portal gun “shells”. We have not been able to find a local supply of flat PVC panels. Thus, we successfully flattened several pieces of PVC pipe using a heat gun. Flattening pipe limits how large of sheet we can create, but this will help for now. We haven’t located a good source for a clear tube for the center either. However, we tested some flat acrylic sheet and should be able to bend the clear tube to the exact diameter that we need