Pirate Candidate Announcement: Hunter Rand for Sparks City Council 2nd Ward
The United States Pirate Party, during our November 2nd meeting, voting to endorse Hunter Rand, who is running for 2nd Ward of the Sparks, Nevada city council!
The Pirate National Committee voted unanimously to endorse Hunter Rand.
This is not Hunter’s first time being involved with the party. Previously, Hunter was a guest speaker during our 2022 Pirate National Conference.
“He is a Pirate” is the sentiment echoed during last night’s meeting.
Hunter, pitching his campaign, went through our platform and discussed how “potholes don’t care who you vote for.”
“I don’t want to be a career politician and everything I do reflects that. My website isn’t ‘Hunter Rand for Office’ or ‘Hunter Rand for Ward 2′”.
In fact, his website is SparksTogether.com
Check out Hunter’s campaign, including the Notes section of his website which features what is essentially his platform page.
If you’re in Sparks, Nevada in their 2nd Ward, know you have a Pirate who wants to represent you.
Hunter Rand, Victory is Arrrs
A Paintball Turret Controlled Via Xbox Controller
Video games, movies, and modern militaries are all full of robotic gun turrets that allow for remotely-controlled carnage. [Paul Junkin] decided to build his own, albeit in a less-destructive paint-hurling fashion.
The turret sits upon a lazy susan bearing mounted atop a aluminium extrusion frame. A large gear is mounted to the bearing allowing the turret to pan when driven by a stepper motor. A pair of pillow block bearings hold a horizontal shaft which mounts the two paint markers, which again is controlled by another stepper motor to move in the tilt axis. An ESP32 microcontroller is responsible for running the show, panning and tilting the platform by commanding the large stepper motors. Firing the paintball markers is achieved with solenoids mounted to the triggers, which cycle fast enough to make the semi-auto markers fire in a way that almost feels like full-auto. Commanding the turret is via an Xbox One controller; communicating with the ESP32 over Bluetooth using the BluePad32 library.
It’s worth noting you shouldn’t shoot paintballs at unsuspecting individuals, since they can do extreme amounts of damage to those not wearing the proper protection. We’ve featured a great many other sentry guns over the years, too, like this impressive Portal-themed build. Video after the break.
youtube.com/embed/UVgqzoGp9NQ?…