Tanker War Gadgets
Here are the gadgets that make the Tanker War display go. The exhibit can be seen here.
Note the warhead in the right rear of the display. It weighed well over 100 pounds, so I need a beefy platform for it to rotate on. See below for details.
Here is the mechanism for the plinth that allows the visitor to spin the Exocet warhead. It had to be chunky because the warhead weighed in excess of 100 pounds. Fortunately, there was a Marine standing around to help me load it into the display.
With plinth in place.
Front view.
Also worth discussing. The videos for this exhibit run on a BrightSign player. Turns out, BrightSign players have programmable outputs, but they are very low current. Since I needed the player to run devices that exceed its current limits, I decided to simply have the player run opto couplers and put all the gadgets on the downstream side. These are always a good option when you want electrically isolated systems to interact.
This artifact is interesting from both sides, which precipitated the need for its rotatability. Yes, I said “rotatability”.