PIRATE'S COVE GAMING BOARD – pt.2
This article finds the second and final part of the step by step tutorial of the building process of a gaming board for a board game called Pirate's Cove that my club's (terrain workshop did a couple of years ago.
The Design:
In the previous article, Andrija and I made the basic outline of the board with the frame, ran the wires underneath the board and made all the ships. The next thing, before the actual build, would be to have all the electronics installed so the terrain could be built around it. Before installment, we needed to check all the calculations and agree on the final layout of all the features.
Electronics:
In this model we decided to fit the smoke generator (hereinafter - fogger), and in every house an LED would be built in order to evoke the effect of burning lamps or candles. As the power source for the board we chose the electricity from the grid which meant 220V AC current (in Croatia). Therefore the alternating current must be mentioned here, since the fogger is powered via the adapter from the city grid. The adapter which goes with the fogger changes AC 220V current to 24V AC also. (NOTE: If the device transforms the current from 220V AC to 24V DC for example, it is then called the transformer - author's note).
The advantage of using city power grid (ie adapters and transformers) is that there is no concern about the consumption of electricity, namely, no batteries which could be spent.
Since the LEDs are working exclusively on DC, it was necessary to connect the LED circuitry in parallel with the fogger. Apart from the fogger branch, we needed to extract one branch to go through Graetz bridge which would be connected to all the LED circuitry. As explained in a previous issue, Graetz combination (ie single-phase full-wave rectifier) only corrects the voltage, but it does not ''straighten'' it. In order to straighten the voltage it is necessary to add an RC circuit. In this gaming board, that was not necessary to make because the local electrical grid works on frequency f = 50 Hz (meaning that the voltage is sinusoidal and makes 50 cycles per second). Using a single-phase full-wave rectifier that frequency doubles, so the frequency is 100Hz. The human eye does not notice the higher frequency of 20Hz. What does this mean exactly? That our LED will be flashing 100 times per second, but you will not notice it. Indeed, it will look as if the LED were constantly lit. It should be noted that Graetz circuit losses of approximately 10% and that voltage 24V DC will therefore be around 22V DC.
The calculation of the LED circuits is relatively simple because there is a lot of repetition. Each branch (except Crew Island) looks the same and as far as the resistance calculation runs as follows:
and for Crew Island:
Here we calculate the electrical power in each branch :
which is relatively high power. It is no surprise when one considers the fact that the resistor reduces the voltage for 20V! This information is important when choosing the resistor, because when you buy it, you will need to emphasize that you are looking for such a powerful resistor. For the Crew Island two resistors of 50Ω and 0.04 W are required
This result is also not surprising because the resistor reduces the voltage for only 2V, and through it flows a current of 20mA.
We now return to the beginning - the adapter, which in this case has Imax=1200mA. The next step is to add all the currents in the branches.
So, to run all the LEDs you need 240mA which leaves 960mA for fogger to work, which after testing with a multimeter showed that is enough. If it were not,the calculation should be revised.
Finally, the elements needed for this project are:
• Fogger (with adapter AC 220V → 24V AC)
• 2 pairs of male-female Jack's
• Graetz bridge
• 7 switches
• 10 R = 1kΩ resistor R, P = 0.5 W
• 2 R = 50Ω resistor
• 27 LEDs (yellow, 3mm)
• 2 LEDs (red, 5mm → Treasure Island, the eyes of the skull)
• 1 LED (red, 3mm → Tavern Island, the upper floor tavern)
• a minimum of 10m of wire.
The Continuation of the Build
Once the electronics were installed and the Graetz bridge was prodected inside a box that was made from balsa wood, we did a test run. The LEDs indeed did not flicker, the volcano produced the fog and we could proceed with the terrain build.
The first island we tackled was Crew Island. We decided to have a small sea town with a town hall and a church with a graveyard on a hill. The streets of the town were made from plastic pieces of a 1/72 medieval castle. The buildings were built by Andrija from 1,5mm thick balsa wood and thin card. The window shutters were about 1x1mm in size and were each cut from a piece of paper. We placed most of the buildings on top of 3mm yellow LEDs that were drilled through the bottom of the plastic street construction.
The fortress on Gun Island was done from the same medieval castle plastic kit. Sides of the octogonal bastions were carefully cut using a scalpel blade. The guns were salvaged from a Revell plastic ship. To finish the job, we placed a chain at the port entrance.
The body of all the islands was made from 2cm thick HD styrofoam. The beaches, cliffs and the rest of the features were modelled from air drying clay (DAS). The piers were done from 2mm thick balsa wood. Once the clay and PVA glue were dry, the islands were coated in watered down PVA glue. The top surfaces were sprinkled over with coarser sand while the beaches were covered with smallest grain sand we could find. In this case, it was chinchilla sand from a local pet shop.
With this, most of the islands were done. All that was left was to do the Pirate's Cove island and make a removable volcano. We had to make the volcano removable to make it possible to fill and empty the vessel for the water that the fogger uses to make fog. If we left the board in one piece, it would have been impossible to empty the tank which would eventually cause the formation of calk or something even worse. Again, the body of the island was built by HD styrofoam. Using styrofoam boards made it possible to have a straight cut between the island and the removable volcano. Once the island part of styrofoam was dry, the tank was placed in its spot and around it another layer of styrofoam was placed and glued to the tank from the top side. Once it was dry, we made the island and volcano features following the same procedure as we did for the rest of the islands using DAS air drying clay. Once it was dry, we textured it with sand (two different sizes).
The islands were painted using Pebeo Deco colours (Black, Brown, Ochre, Ash, White and Grey) and flocked using static grass. The trees were made from twisted wire trees bought on Ebay. When the islands were done, I painted the seas. As I wanted the blue to be really bright, I used a white undercoat that was hand painted using a large brush as I didn't want to risk botching up the rest of the work by accidental spillage by using sprey/air brush. After it was done, I mixed several shades of blue (by mixing Pebeo Deco White and Blue). Each progressive layer had more Blue in it. Before pouring in the resin, we decided to make a compass with a club sign. The painted design on a piece of paper was simply cut out and glued using watered down PVA glue. All that was needed was to mix the resin and pour it in carefully. For this, we used Gedeo Crystal Resin. A quick calculation revealed that we needed 600ml of resin in order to make the water 1,5-2mm deep. Carefully we mixed the two part resin (mixing ratio is 2:1 vol which makes it easy to work with). Once the mixture was fully mixed I added a couple of drops of Pebeo Vitrail Sky Blue colour. Be careful when mixing, because you can easily overdo it and be left with too dark a resin.
After a drying period of about 24 hours, the board was done and we could present it to the guys from the club!
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