Electric Kontiki motor power supply and PWM questions

With the spud gun you'd still need some wadding to seal the gases in the bore of the barrel, so it'd make sense to just use a spud and put the bait and leader in after the spud was rammed down the barrel.

When I was a kid we'd make black powder and fire a cannon with wooden bullets (reinforced copper tube cannon with a spark plug igniter). To seal the gases we'd wrap the wood dowel with electrical tape and ram it down the barrel. As soon as we had it perfected the parents put a stop to it.

We hollowed out some dowels and packed them with slower burning powder and shot "tracers" into the night sky - in the city - that seemed to get their attention. It was loads of fun while it lasted. We moved on to making rockets.

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Ed,

Thankyou for thaking the time especially at this time of year to reply to my post.

Unfortunately I have no specs apart from 12VDC/30A 30lb thrust and I can't seem to find any more on the net either. The motor itself isn't stamped with a make or model number and the supplier has no other specs for it. I got the motor from a friend who wanted in on the project and he contacted the supplier by phone to try and get more info to no avail.

The LDO will have to be changed to a LM2940 5V/1A as I've found that when all is fine the current draw is under 100mA but with side pressure, as in a weighted line being connected to the servo release mechanism the current draw can go up to 0.5A.

The PIC will also have no external circuit powered/activated apart from the PWM circuit during motor startup.

I see that there are "Soft-start" features in many DC motor controllers and I'll also look into that feature.

Regards,

Rubicon.