Dragon Ball Radar

License: Attribution-Share Alike 3D Printer 3D Printing Displays ESP32

3D printed dragon radar in grass

This project was originally posted on extralongdivision.com

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been making a replica Dragon Radar from Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball series. The project now looks pretty close to its anime inspiration. This post will condense all the design decisions made into one place. For nitty-gritty details, read the previous series of developer logs.

Capabilities

Before I get into how I made the project, let’s go over what it can actually do. It’s pretty simple: press the button and the radar starts beeping and shows a graphic indicating nearby dragon balls.

In the future, it’d be cool to make replica dragon balls that the radar can detect. Ideally, beeping faster depending on how close the ball is while also indicating the ball’s proximity on screen. Perhaps in a future version.

Electrical Design

The circuitry contains a handful of components:

A microcontroller
An audio amplifier
A display
Battery charger
Battery monitor

The schematic is a combination of Adafruit's Qualia and Adafruit's ESP32-S3 Feather. Instead of explaining the schematic, you can study or modify it yourself. I’ve released the KiCAD project as Solderpad Hardware License 2.1.

schematic

Mechanical Design

The Dragon Radar’s enclosure is designed for 3D printing. There are only four components.

The enclosure front

The enclosure back

The button shaft

The button cap

Heat-set inserts need to be installed into the 3D-printed parts for everything to assemble together. Using an FDM printer, all the parts took ~17 hours to print. The enclosure front and back were the biggest time sinks.

Again, print the radar for yourself from the files available on the project's repository. For step-by-step instructions on how to build the radar, follow this tutorial.

Software

All the code is written in CircuitPython. The microcontroller is an ESP32-S3, and the board is programmed via a USB-C connector, so you could use just about any toolchain you want to modify the firmware.

Honestly, the code is messy. It also doesn’t implement all the hardware. I.e the battery monitor doesn’t do anything, nor is the backlight brightness programmable. And it probably should be a finite state machine instead of a bunch of if-else statements. The code is permissively released under Apache-2.0, so please improve it.

Next Steps

As said earlier, a tutorial is already out. I’ve finally documented the project's repository as well. Development for this phase is over. If you’d like to see more updates, shoot me an email or message me on social media. I’ll be posting some video content of the radar and starting work on my next project.

Part of the Dragon Radar series: