Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

There has been a lot of interest in buying a completed Stargate. Making them takes a lot of time and effort and I am not able to “mass produce” them. However, due to the enormous interest and positive feedback I’m getting. I decided to make an extra Stargate, complete with DHD and put it up for auction. The Auction was a success, and I will do it again. If you are interested in getting notified when a new stargate is up for auction, you can add you email to the list here.

If you would like to build a Stargate yourself, you can buy the 3D files, the program etc, and print a Stargate of your own:

Yes!
The Pegasus stargate is well under way. (But then I needed a break)

There is not really short answer to that question. There are many stargate builders, and they use all kinds of printers. Mostly FFF printers but some builders also printed some of the parts with resin 3D printers. Most parts fits on rather small print beds, but here are some parts with a larger base surface. If you have a very large printer there are some alternate STL version included in the archive.

The stargate you see on this site is printed entirely with ABS filament using a Wanhao duplicator 6 3D printer. Some folks have used other materials like PLA+ with great results.

I think it is best to run some tests and see what works best for your printer. Some builders recommend 70% infill for structure parts, 50% on others. Most builders print with 0.1 – 0.2 layer heights. Thinner layers take more time, but yield a finer result.

Printing time will vary from printer to printer and the chosen settings. But it does take a lot of time. I printed most of my parts in 0.1 mm layers which results in about 2 weeks effective printing time. Other builders report 260 hours (almost 11 days).

You can find the needed screws in the parts list at the bottom of this page.

Choosing the right screw size is rather straightforward. There are screw holes in the models and they come in two sizes. The smaller holes fit the 1,4mm thick screws and the slightly larger holes fit the 2.5mm thick screws. Whenever you see a small hole, use the 1,4x6mm screw, and when you see the larger hole, use 2,5x12mm. BUT, there are a few exceptions to the previous rule:

• When assembling the symbol ring, and attaching the chevron PCB you need to use the 4mm long screws instead, since the 6mm will be too long.
• When attaching the core_ring to the back ring you need to use the 16mm long screw. (the 12mm is too short).
• The 30mm screws are only used to secure the inner ring, all they way from the back of the gate and through to the inner ring.

Adafruit has a nice article about stacking the motor hats.

Also, Jon made these great pictures that describes it well:

Life comes first. But it is progressing nicely. (The world wide chip shortage is making it delayed)

Jon is selling hardware kits and and PCB kits from his etsy store.

The inner ring can be a bit confusing to assemble. You need to place the correct part at the correct spot. Use the numbers of the back of the ring to place them as seen in this picture:

There is a file in the program that lets you customise what chevron uses which led and which motor. The file is called chevrons.py and are located in the sg1 folder on the raspberry pi. If you follow the wire diagram here when wiring up the motors and LEDs, your setup in the file should look like this:

chevrons = {1: Chevron(21, 3),
            2: Chevron(16, 4),
            3: Chevron(20, 5),
            4: Chevron(26, 6),
            5: Chevron(6, 7),
            6: Chevron(13, 8),
            7: Chevron(19, 9),
            8: Chevron(None, 10),
            9: Chevron(None, 11)}

If you wire it differently, you can update the code to match your setup. The first number in the parenthesis , is the gpio led number and the second is the motor number. (Motor number 1 and 2 are not used by the chevrons, they are for the stepper motor driving the symbol ring).

Making your Stargate unavailable for others is very simple. You can take your stargate out of subspace with the following command:

sudo wg-quick down subspace

Immediately after running the command above, your stargate will not be reachable in subspace and after a maximum of 10 minutes it will show as offline in the address-book. To put your gate back in subspace so that you can dial up your fellow gate builders and accept incoming wormholes again, simply run the command:

sudo wg-quick up subspace

How about automating this at specific times? Just make a cron job on the pi to run the commands at your specific times. Here is an explanation of the cron job on the raspberry pi. If you are having issues with the cron job, there are many fellow stargate builders eager to help on the discord server.

Please note that if you reboot your stargate, it will automatically try to enter subspace again, regardless of your previous commands.

Got an incoming wormhole and wonder who is dialling you? Most actions are logged in the sg1.log file on your stargate. You can check the last 50 entries in the log by running this command:

tail -n 50 /home/sg1/sg1/sg1.log

Pro tip: If you run the command tail -f /home/sg1/sg1/sg1.log you can monitor the activity happening on your stargate in real time.

When the stepper motor is running it is vibrating quite a lot which again causes some noise. We can reduce this noise by printing the stepper holder in a flexible material. The softer stepper holder will absorb much of the vibrations making it a bit more quiet. Other stargate builders also line the large gear behind the symbol ring with felt to reduce the noise.

The SG1 Update January 2022, new base also includes a new STL for the large gear meant to be printed in TPU. It will also greatly help reduce the stepper noise.

Some stargate builders report that they have a hard time fitting the ball bearings on the shaft of the ball bearing holder. I printed the stargate in ABS and the ball bearings fits perfectly. But, with a 3mm shaft every tiny variation will be very noticeable. ABS does shrink a bit after printing. If you use an alternate filament type you might need to shave or sand the shaft to make the ball bearing fit. Also, the hole in the shaft is for you to insert a screw to strengthen it. The screw must be inserted from the back-side, not not interfere with the spinning ring.

Jon made this great picture that shows the connections: