CoilGun MK.I

This is the first coilgun I've ever made, the Coilgun MK.I.

When me and my friend Alex started this project back in 2014, we had very little knowledge on electronics and programming, so we went out on a limb.

The 3 coils were wound very badly on a 10mm PVC pipe using scrap enamel copper wire of various sizes.

To power the coils we used 3 capacitor banks with 4x 25V@4700μF capacitors in parallel, that didn't give us much power to be honest, but we didn't know. An SMPS was used to charge up the capacitors to ~25V.

Then to discharge the capacitors into the coils we used a relay board paired with a Raspberry Pi 3 to time the firing. A little python script did the job.

We've been using a small metal pin as projectile, weighting ~2g.

This prototype didn't work at all, but surely was a good test bench to learn the basics of electronics and programming.

Features

• Raspberry Pi 3 as the MCU
• 3 Stages, each one with 4x 25V@4700μF capacitors in parallel
• Relays with manual firing timing
• SMPS to charge up the capacitor bank
• Efficency unkown