Night Vision MK3
We started with a laser hand grip to which I also fashioned a 18650 holder in & a 12V boost PCB. The other starting material was the GEN1 tube & driver with a IR beacon that really does not emit much light. These materials were kindly gifted to me by Edwin Burton.
From that I was able to design the case in blender & print it off with my 3D printer. Sadly a HDD crash lead to the loss of all the design files. Luckily I had already finnished & preinted the parts by the time of the HDD crash. Thanks Segate.
The part that heald the tube was designed to take M42 lenses as they are readily avalible & resoabaly cheap, it would also alow me to use a wide range of diffrent lenses with the scope. I looked op the focusing distance from the flange of a camera to the film, turned out to be 20mm so I mesured that & did a few test prints.
For the main boxes that housed the driver & the IR flood light LED I used projet boxes. I cut the holes I needed & also mellted in screw threads salvaged from old laptops into the 3D printed housing as it would allow me to dismantle the thing as much as I wanted.
I also leaned very quickly yiou want to have a very wide aperture lens for thiss thing to even have a changce at being remotely effective. f1.4 or wider, really f1.4 is not enougth.
The rear screen, I did not go for an eye pice, for two main reasons, the firat the screen was big enougth. The second I once again did not have sutible optics, needs some more camcorder viewfinders.
The frount, shows off the IR blarst LED that basicly does nothing & the fron of the tube with the M42 lens mount.
Intrestingly base handle had a focusable IR laser in it. When I pulled it apart I thought it looksed like a constant current driver for a laser diode. I was not wrong. When you look into it with your own eyes it just looks like a very dim red. Basicly it seems to be a way of pointing at targets in the dark without them seeing you. Unless they have night vision equipment that is actualy caperble.
Night vision scope running, it is not to sensertive to low light ironicly. Funny how some of the soviet stuff is crap. But it worked & the case was a 100% success.