Flash Gun - Ender's Game

My wife is a long-time fan of Ender’s Game, so when the movie came out she decided to make a Dragon Army Flash Suit. Naturally, this meant she needed a gun to go with it, which is where I came in. Now you can light up the interstellar sky with your very own Flash Gun prop replica.

I designed the gun in SketchUp and printed the original on a MakerBot Replicator Dualstrusion. I started out by tracing a side view picture from the movie of the gun. I took this 2D image and started adding depth and layering pieces until I had a solid block model. I took dimensions from the block model and visited SparkFun and adafruit to determine what electronics to use with the final piece.

Researching parts helped me to determine that conventional batteries would not provide the power I needed in the space I had for any reasonable time period. It was time to build my first piece with a rechargeable LiPo battery. With this knowledge, I selected the remainder of the electronics I would need: two