Arduino Laser Target Game

[kaysik]

What do you do if you like shooting stuff, but you live in Australia where gun laws are very strict.  So strict in fact BB guns and AirSoft are also illegal - basically it's nerf guns or nothing.  Personally I decided to build my own target game based of lasers of course!  I took an old nerf gun, ripped out the insides and installed an old laser pointer.  A simple button behind the original nerf trigger mechanism and instant laser gun.  Then throw few photo resistors and servo's to make targets and hey you have a fairly entertaining laser game:

Explanation: http://youtu.be/5blKeDx60N0
Me playing: http://youtu.be/CF_DX-XkC-8

The components used I used are were:

• Arduino Duemilanove (out dated now, but any arduino will do just fine)


• Servo Controller - (http://littlebirdelectronics.com/products/serial-servo-controller)


• 4x 5volt Servos - (http://littlebirdelectronics.com/products/9g-micro-servo-1-6kg)


• 4x Photo resistor - (http://littlebirdelectronics.com/products/mini-photocell)


• Nerf Firestrike - (http://www.hasbro.com/nerf/en_AU/shop/details.cfm?R=F97212E4-5056-9047-F560-4544B6119877:en_AU)


• Old laser pointer


• 5v wall wart style power supply (I love running everything off 5v so I don't have to transform anything).


• And standard stuff like wife, solder, breadboard etc

I also had an unused plastic toolbox which I mounted everything in.  A simple button inside the box puts all the targets into a "down" state so the lid can close up for easy transport.  If I tidied up the wiring there should be room for the gun + wall socket transformer inside the box so the entire game packs away nicely.  In the video's it's sitting on my desk next to my PC only because that's where I work on it, but it is totally self contained and portable since the arduino is set up to be powered by the 5v wall wart when USB isn't connected.

Future improvements:

• Score board - it'd be great to mount an LED matrix like http://www.sureelectronics.net/goods.php?id=1119 into the box lid to print out scores and give feedback such as 'game over', or 'shoot to start'.


• Sound - both to the gun itself and to the board.  Let you know what's going on.


• Better game code - currently it's a pretty simple system that randomly selects 1 target to show then another with decreasing time between them.  If you don't shoot a target in time it'll fall on it's own, and the game ends when 3 targets have timed out.  I'd like to write better code so that it mixes things up and has a less regular pattern.


• Put a chip in the gun - right now if you hold the trigger down the laser stays on.  I'd love to mount something small in the gun so that holding the trigger will still only turn the laser pointer on for 500ms or so.


• Adding wide angle IR LED to the gun - and an IR reciever on the box so that the game can tell when your shot missed (IR turns on when the laser does, so even if you miss with the laser then the wide angle IR LED will still register your shot).  That way you could create lots of game modes such as limited ammo situations where all 4 targets are up, unlimited time, but you're only allowed 4 shots for example..

[AWOL]

What do you do if you like shooting stuff, but you live in Australia where gun laws are very strict.

I understand getting hold of laser pointers can be tricky too.
Nice project.

[nickgammon]

Nicely done.

[baselsw]

Good job.. it looks like fun..!!

[JB_AU]

What a great idea, i love seeing creativity like this.

[dudi1993]

nice project
i love it
in my country, it's illegal to have a gun 

[Peter_I]

Nice!

The video makes me think of "Whac-a-mole" with a gun.

I fully agree that the laser should be restricted to short pulses.

[Pauly]

Nice project.  Well done.

[Peter_I]

I spent my weekend playing, and made a sketch that counts number of shots fired  (nice little 50 ms pulses), one shot with each pull of the trigger. A selector switch to choose between single shots and bursts..... and then I find this:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/opensource/libraryview.jsp?search_by=Arduino+laser

A project about building an arduino based laser tag game.
From a quick read-through, it looks pretty good, and quite a few elements from it could certainly  be recycled.