But they seem to take way more of a whack than I want to make them work. Attaching them to the back of the target is very hit and miss (no pun intended), they also suffer quite a lot of bounce once they are triggered.
But they seem to take way more of a whack than I want to make them work. Attaching them to the back of the target is very hit and miss (no pun intended), they also suffer quite a lot of bounce once they are triggered.
Description gives you a clear clue already. It's a contact type sensor, so will bounce as long as your board bounces. You'll just need to do some filtering on that - just regular button debounce, possibly with increased debounce time, will do great.
Those sensors look much more promising, and will do the job much better, as long as you can get the impact energy to transfer to the disks. That part is much easier with your first sensor as those will simply vibrate with your target.
Indeed you don't need that breakout board, just a handful of resistors.
You'll want to have a good attachment between the target and the piezo disk so that the vibrations will transfer. The target should be of a material that will transfer the vibrations well. A piece of sheet metal is great. A piece of soft foam is not great. I used one of those basic piezo disks mounted to a piece of sheet metal to reliably detect impacts from 5 ft sample rolls of thin twine dropped from only about a foot. I'm sure the nerf packs much more of an impact so you might not need to be so careful as I did. The piezo disks are available in multiple diameters and I did find that the larger ones were a bit better at giving a signal from light impacts.
