Medkit Preview

Still waiting on the final selector knob, and the Mysterious Part that does all the healing and stuff (Shapeways order sent in just before the holidays).

But outside of those, and the associated wiring (because the Mysterious Part just had to have some LEDs put inside it!) the Medkit is done.

I'll take some nice pictures soon.  Until then, these will have to do;

 

I didn't take a lot of work-in progress shots either, sorry.  Anyhow...boring text stuff (but not very much of that either) below the fold:


The Medkit is just plain mysterious.  In the Morrow Project universe, we are pretending that it somehow can not only diagnose ailments, not only somehow treat wounds just by being held up to the body, but even more amazing, will give medical advice over the 8-digit display.






 Thus the concept of the three buttons.  We are supposing you are going to make menu selections using them as up/down/select, and read pages of instructions.  Or something.

With that, it just wasn't worthwhile (or plausible!) to actually program the display.  But seemed a shame to not do something.  So this is a hardwired display; four zeros in a row.

And the LED blinks.  And I actually walked down to the Rat Shack for a blinker LED.  And then promptly blew it up by being careless with a battery (my desk is a complete and utter mess at this point).

So I have a bunch of 555's lying around unused these days and I feel sorry for the poor things.  So I went ahead and soldered one up.  Calculated the RC values and everything, but for some reason I was about 5x too low.  Fortunately, I could just swap out C1 and I was back in business.

I also chose to run individual wires to the Vacuum Fluorescent Display instead of just stringing wire between half the pins to solder them into a big bunch.   So quite a bit of wire to tuck into the case there!

There's also the easter egg.  I was also looking for button batteries at the Rat Shack but twelve bucks and change for the ones I needed was a bit much.  And they were out of AAA holders.  So I modified a AA holder, and soldered all that up too, and it is now quite a bit of work to get the lid down.  Maybe the twelve bucks would have been worth it after all...

It is messy, and shows signs of me both rushing and not caring.  But it works, and it is done.  At least, until I pry it open to stick something into the Mysterious Part.