Nocturnal,
Ya, as soon as I got a look inside it I pulled out the digital camera and got many shots of leg/gear/cam position for reassembly. Very happy I didn't just yank all the legs off before thinking.

Now he's decided that it'd be okay to use a green one, so I won't be pirating parts from the new one to fix it. Good kid though, he says I can have the old one, so I can graft the nerf gat to my RSMedia :) That should be fun. Hoping the gun just takes an on/off switch to fire rather than any logic.

Re: battery and charging; The manual said 5.5 hours for the first two charges, then 4 hour charges after. My plan was to go ahead and use the supplied trickle charger the first couple times and then switch to using my ~30 minute charger. I don't know if using the 5.5 hour trickle the first couple times is necessary over just using the fast charger from the get-go. I just figured it can't hurt for the initial charges to be trickled.

Watch out, don't step in the anthropomorphization.

Already pulled it apart, then went hunting for the plastic piece at the end of the spring :) Found out the two thin wires go to a button that appears to prevent firing while retracted, the two big wires power the motor. One direction of the motor runs the up/down, reversing the motor runs the loading mechanism/firing pump.

Hooking it straight to the 7.2v battery makes it load/fire. Now I gotta figure out what kind of amps are pulled when that thing is pushing against that spring, so I can figure out power from somewhere else. Oh, and how in the world I'm gonna trigger it.

Watch out, don't step in the anthropomorphization.

Nocturnal said: Two options, you can hook a micro-controller into the serial lines between the media board and the main board. If you choose your command set carefully, the media board will be able to issue commands to your microcontroller that are ignored by the body. The other option is to use the GPIO pins off the media board for control.

 Both of which require me to get off my, um, woohoo and actually do your serial mod in order to program the Media, right? Or are there built-in commands (via the remote) that are not translated to real actions? Not that I have a problem with the serial mod, it's mostly the getting off the woohoo part...

We went back to that store and found them all sold out of the nsect (at $17, surprise). Kiddo is all bummed. I tell him how a replacement would probably wear out just like the previous one anyway. We checked out all sorts of RC cars and trucks and found nothing. Eventually we ended up at Toys R Us, and found the nsect for $60. So we bought a RoboQuad :)

Haha. He'd saved 7 dollars. I offset the nsect at $17  to replace a $12 (my $5 offset) item at RatShack that failed too. Now I've offset a $40 item cause I felt bad the $17 thing broke too. All said and done, I'm out of pocket just over $60, and his 7 bucks almost covered the 4 C batteries we had to buy for the quad... Fun fun fun being a parent.

Watch out, don't step in the anthropomorphization.

Aha! It didn't click in my head you were talking about the media/main boards' serial connection (even though, scrolling up and rereading, you clearly said that).

Being pretty green at this electronics bit; I can just tee the micro into that serial connection? So two things would be receiving the signal sent by the media board.

Okay, I'm off to read your Media hacking pages and the Robosapien.tk forums

Watch out, don't step in the anthropomorphization.