Hi, I'm Andrew and this is Blaster Breakdown. Today I'll show you how I turned
this - into this. This is what I call the Chronobluevader. IIt's a standard
flywheel upgrade with new cage, wheels and motors, 2S lipo, voltmeter activated
by the jam door, LED replacement - blue for green, and Chronobarrel
integration. I first saw Walcom S7 do this a few months back, and I thought that's
something I have to try. This one actually belongs to my wife Anna - you can
see here using it in some footage up here. The wiring is a
bit interesting on the inside how everything worked together, so let's have
a look inside and see how I did it.
And so here we have the Evader in pieces; the only parts I've still got in the
blaster are the voltmeter and the switch, only because they're
glued and epoxied in place. And of course the switch is connected to the
flywheel motors and cage assembly. And this is the part of the Chronobarrel
that sits in front of the flywheel cage. So this is a new Chronobarrel,
of course it runs on two double-a batteries. And this works by having an
LED and a detector on opposite sides of the barrel, and that detects when a dart
passes through. And from the length of time it takes for a dart to pass between
these the Chronobarrel works out the velocity of the dart. And so here's what
the inside looks like; one pair of wires on each side for the LED emitter and the
detector. You can see them a bit clearer there. And you can see I've extended the
original white and yellow and gray wires with JST connectors.
And here's the display of the Chronobarrel glued to the top of the magwell.
So just like Walcom S7 I cut around the base of this top part and
then gradually ground it down until it matched the profile of the top of the
magwell which is on a slight slope. As you can see it looks pretty clean and I
made it as level as I possibly could.
There are three pairs of wires that I've routed inside the shell; two go to the
dart detector front barrel section and the third is to power the unit. The wires
that power the unit go to a buck converter first this is a set three volt
one inside a bit of heat-shrink glued into place. And the reason that I use
these JST connectors was exactly for this purpose: so that I could take the
shell apart without having wires connected all over the place.
I bought these on eBay I think there were only a couple of bucks for ten pairs. I
think they're 22 gauge but they don't need to carry much current so that's not
a problem. This is a buck converter from a worker kit -
this one's adjustable but you can get ones that have a set voltage. And these
take your input voltage down to another level that you need for a particular
reason. In this case I want to steady three volts to power the Chronobarrel.
So red and black go to the lipo, white and gray go to the Chronobarrel.
Now the inner barrel of the Chronobarrel is quite a bit thicker than the
standard Nerf faux barrel. So after cutting it to the correct length what I needed
to do was grind down and sand the outer edge until the outer diameter matched
that of the usual nineteen millimeter faux barrel. Of course both the stock
barrel attachment inner part and the flywheel cage outlet are both designed
for that nineteen millimeter faux barrel size. Now that took a while to get just
right, but in the end I managed to have both parts front and back fit together
nicely. Moving on to the flywheel cage: this is an OFP 42.5
millimeter cage printed by Dean at BlasterTECH. It's got the Worker smooth
fly wheels and Fang Revamps. This spacing provides eight millimeters of crush
which results in a nice 140 or so FPS with the community darts that we use at
the Brisbane Area Nerf Group events, without being too rough on this shared
resource. Just focusing on the 16 gauge black and red wires you can see it's a
standard single switch set up between the lipo and the motors, with an
XT60 connector of course. And here's the other JST connector that brings power to
the Chronobarrel.
And I've actually got the positive lead of that attached to the control board
that's stuck on the back of the battery tray, just because it was easier to do
when I was doing it. This board and the front half of the one attached to the
flywheel cage connects to the front and the back LEDs and also has the resistors
required to operate these built in. If you connected LEDs to a power supply at
6, or 7.4, or 8.4 volts
they just pop, so I definitely needed to keep these as is. The front board also
connects to the flywheel motors so I've basically cut it in half and only kept
the forward piece that I needed. I've hot-glued it to the cage just as
that's a convenient location. The Evader has six LEDs; three 5mm and
three 3mm size. There are two of the 5mm ones stuck
into these light tubes at the top back and the third at the bottom front. Two of
the 3mm ones are attached to the front barrel attachment, and these
can shine forward when a barrel piece is fixed in place, and the third goes into
this diffuser piece that sits inside the front hand grip.
Replacing the LEDs then is as simple as snipping off the green ones and
soldering on the color of your choice for the same size.
When working with LEDs you'll see that one leg is longer than the other, and
that should always be the positive side. You can check this by holding them
against any 3 volt coin battery, which also lets you make sure the LED
actually works before you solder it in place. Now the face of the voltmeter
I've just super glued in place - it's all clear so no need to cut a hole there. And
I've wired the positive lead to the stock jam door switch, so now when the
jam door is opened the circuit is completed and the voltmeter gives a reading from
the battery. And when the jam door is closed it turns off again. Now for the
fun part of beginning to organize the wires. This is the base plate that holds
the pusher in place can also help keep some wires where they need to be. The
magwell lock piece can also be used for cable management, and then the trigger
and pushr pieces can be fixed in place.
And there we go. Fitting the flexible light tubes is just a matter of sticking
the correct 5mm LED in the end, and then getting them to sit down in the
right place. Near the end at each location there is a piece of plastic
jutting out that the two legs of the LED straddles, and that helps to keep it in
place. The lower tube goes in just the same,
only there's an LED at both ends. And then we can fit the battery tray onto
its mounting posts. And I'll just check that the cables are sitting nicely and
pusher still moves freely. I've got the front 5mm LED in place and the
3mm one on the longest wire is the one that goes into this diffuser
piece that sits inside the front hand grip. Also at the front here we have two
more switches. The first one is the main LED switch that the foregrip trigger
controls - that's the main switch that turns all the LEDs on or off. And the
second controls the two 3mm muzzle piece LEDs. If nothing is attached
to the front of the blaster then these will not turn on, but when you do attach
something that'll press down on that switch and enables those LEDs as well.
And that leaves the final two 3mm LEDs that slot into the front muzzle
attachment on either side.
And then we can slot in the Chronobarrel piece would we've already trimmed to the
right length and ground down to the right outer diameter. And then we can fit
in the foregrip diffuser piece with the final 3mm LED. So that's
everything connected and we've just got the three JST connectors left ready to
join up to the other side of the shell. And it's time to screw down the flywheel
cage. And now I can connect a lipo and verify that everything that used to work
still does. Of course you shouldn't test a new circuit with a lipo - always use
double As. And there you can see the main LEDs, the front LEDs,
and the flywheels going nicely. And if we open the jam door
the voltmeter works too. Next I can connect the three pairs of JST
connectors. The rear one is obviously the power, and I just make sure the cable
doesn't obstruct either the pusher or the magwell. And the front two I've
marked each pair of male and female with either horizontal or vertical stripes,
just so that I can ensure I'm joining them up the right way. And then I'll
just make sure everything sits nicely, the wires don't stick out, test again
with the lipo. The Evader is already fairly long, so Anna just likes a short
butt piece here instead of a longer stock. And the last thing I did was shorten
the front barrel piece just by cutting it short, and gluing in the attachment
ring on the inside here.
And there we go: the Chronobarrel works, the LEDs work, the voltmeter works
enabled by the jam door. And most important of all the flywheels work. Okay
so now I'm going to test putting ten darts over the chronograph. These are brand
new Worker red full-lengths. I'll call out the value on the Chronobarrel at
the same time.
So the Chronobarrel's reading a few FPS higher than the chrony. Now I've
got a theory to explain this difference. The Chronobarrel is calibrated for
full-length darts, and everybody knows that if you use half length darts then
you'll get an FPS reading about double what you'd expect. So I got the calipers
out and measured a full length red Worker dart, and a white Elite Hasbro
dart and here's what I found. The Elite dart was 74mm, the
Worker 72. And if we multiply the Chronobarrel readings by 72 over 74 the result
is within a rounding error of the expensive chronograph reading. So maybe
the Chronobarrel isn't as inaccurate as a lot of people presume, including me,
once you take into account the actual length of the darts being used.
Let's go to a firing demo. Unfortunately by the time I came to film this in the
afternoon the wind had really picked up. It's taking darts left to right at about
10 knots. And here we go firing 22 full length Worker reds just as fast as I can.
Well the wind took a few but I think that's a pretty decent spread, under
real-world conditions.
So there you have it. That's the Chronobluevader: LED replacement
Chronobarrel integration, flywheel upgrade, running on a 2S lipo. Thanks for
watching, I hope you enjoyed it. Please leave any questions or comments below.
I'll see you next time.