Planet Arduino

Well, here it is: a shoe-in for the new world’s largest NERF gun. (Video, embedded below.) The Guinness people haven’t shown up yet to award [Michael Pick], but at 12.5 feet, this baby is over twice as long as the current record holder, which belongs to former NASA mechanical engineer Mark Rober and his now-puny six-foot six-shooter.

We have to wonder if it is technically bigger than the six-shooter, because they seem to be roughly the same scale, except that [Michael] chose a much bigger model to start from. The main body is made from wood, and there are a ton of 3D-printed details that make it look fantastically accurate. The whole thing weighs over 200 pounds and takes at least two people to move it around. We especially love the DIY darts that [Michael] came up with, which are made from a PVC tube inside a section of pool noodle, topped off with a 3D printed piece for that distinctive orange cap.

Propelling those darts at around 50 MPH is a 3,000 PSI air tank connected to an Arduino Pro Mini that controls the trigger and the air valves. While [Michael] hasn’t run the thing quite that high, it does plenty of damage in the neighborhood of 40-80 PSI. As you’ll see in the video after the break, this is quite the ranged weapon. Watch it blow a hole clean through a sheet of drywall and much more.

Want to build something with a bit more stealth? Make it death from above with a NERF quadcopter.

Named the grand prize winner of Instructables’ Arduino Contest, a maker known as otjones99 has created an interesting take on the classic Nerf sentry turret design by building one that uses an FPV headset to see and fire at targets. The turret consists of a turntable for moving the assembly side-to-side, along with a simple servo mechanism for tilting the end up and down. Small foam balls are ejected from the turret by a pair of counter-rotating wheels that were taken from a couple of blower style fans.

In order to control the rotating base and the loading/tilting mechanisms, a single Arduino Uno was positioned at the bottom and connected to the two servos and the ESCs for the spinning wheels. Commands for actuating the sentry are received by the onboard nRF24L01 wireless module that sends them to the Uno over the SPI bus. 

The user is able to move the sentry turret by turning a pair of potentiometers within a Logitech joystick attached to an Arduino Nano. There is also a set of momentary pushbuttons to switch the safety on or off and to launch. This data gets transmitted from the nRF24L01 module onboard to the other one on the turret. 

This project is a really fun way to explore both first-person control and topics in wireless communication. To read more about the sentry turret, you can check out otjones99’s well-documented tutorial here.

The post Fire foam balls from this Arduino-based wireless Nerf sentry turret appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Makers love Nerf guns, but Nathan Li takes foam-based home security to a new level with his mini Nerf tank. Naturally there’s an Arduino Uno in there, powering the mobile dart launcher.

Scruffy lookin’ Nerf tank herder

This miniature roving robot, known as M.A.T. (Modular Arduino Tank), is beautifully built. Not only is it remarkably accurate, but the dart launching mechanism is a triumph of non-lethal weapon design.

Unlike the majority of Nerf mods out there, this tank doesn’t actually use any parts from a toy gun. Attached to the front of the dart turret is a pair of flywheel motors. These spin the flywheels in opposite directions, at a pretty fast rate. An arm mounted on a servo feeds a dart into the flywheels, which propel it at an impressive lick!

The next dart is gravity fed, and simply falls into place, making it quite a rapid firing micro tank.

Testing the tank

Li takes his tank through a series of batteries, all of which show impressive results. Accuracy is spot on, which isn’t easy with notoriously unreliable Nerf darts. A five-foot muzzle velocity test achieves a whopping 35MPH dart speed. The distance test sends foam projectiles an impressive 44 feet.

Then there’s a demonstration of some excellent grouping in the accuracy test.

It’s sparked up a whole conversation over on Reddit about how the firing mechanism can be modified. The flywheel thrower operates much like baseball launchers (and this dog toy, for example), which has really captured the maker community’s imagination. Shooting dried peas seems to be a popular idea. As does the idea of building in object detection for pest control.

The maker has shared his Arduino code on GitHub. You can also find the 3D print files and a build guide on Li’s website.

The post A remote-controlled Arduino Nerf tank appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Nerf guns can be a lot of fun, but what if you want your launcher to shoot 10 projectiles simultaneously? Is so, then look no further than James Bruton’s custom blaster.

His 3D-printed project employs two BLDC-powered rollers to accelerate cartridges of 10 darts each, and allows for quick reloading via a clever manual locking mechanism. The device holds five magazines, for total of 50 darts.

When loaded, an arcade-style button fires the darts, pushing them into the rollers at the same time using a couple of servo motors. Everything is powered by a six-cell 24V LiPo battery, while an Arduino Mega is used for control, and to track which cartridge is in place, enabling the operator to concentrate on getting shots downrange!

[Paul] and his buddy [Jonathan] recently had a zombie themed Larp event to go to, so in the spirit of making the experience more realistic, they decided to upgrade their Nerf N-Strike Stryfe gun.

They started by cracking open the gun and making note of the available space for a few bells and whistles. Luckily, thanks to traditional plastic injection molding practices — there’s lots of room!

Upgrades include a magazine sensor, a jam sensor, a trigger sensor and a voltmeter to make the gun a little bit smarter. A knockoff Arduino Pro Mini takes in all these inputs and outputs it to a 7-segment LED display for easy visibility. Our favorite part is the ammo sensor, which keeps a tally of how many shots you’ve used. It’s simply an IR photo-diode and IR transistor in a Darlington configuration, connected to the GPIO interrupt pin on the fake Arduino.

It’s not an overly complex project, but very nicely executed — Maybe Nerf should adopt something like this in the future! Still waiting on an automated sentry turret though…

And if you’re curious about ZombieLarp, you can find out all about it here!