digital dart board

Projects General Guidance
1

So i am looking for some guidance on building a 'digital dart board'. Basically i want to shoot a dart board with a nerf gun and have it keep score.

The basic design is easy, the advice i am looking for is how to detect the dart hitting the board, and of coarse the location. My first though was to get several concentric rings about 3cm wide cut out of plexy glass, just glue several momentary mini pushbutton switches to the back, and wire the whole thing to the digital pins of the Arduino. My concern is that there will not be enough (or consistant) impact to push these switches.

I briefly thought about some sort of IR beam-break, but that seems like i would need a whole slew of detectors, and i am not sure how feasible that would be.

If i had a consistant impact i may be able to use some sort of accelerometer, but i defiantly will not.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

2

use piezo transducers. they are cheap and can detect tapping. you might need some type of amplification if the darts don't hit hard enough

3

Good idea. I thought about piezos, but dont have much experience with them and did not know they were that sensitive.

4

I have a Nerf dart style dart board and it uses concentric rings with four or five piezo sensors on each ring. It worked well, so piezos are definitely the way to go here. Search around for some piezo examples and see if you can learn a bit about how to use them.