Context for the following post: The project I'm working on is a Nerf dartboard that detects where a dart hits within the target area and displays graphics on a screen/LED matrix accordingly. I've experimented with using a resistive touchpad as the target area but the foam darts don't impact with enough force consistently to register an event on the touch pad. Therefore I'm looking into using IR touch frames instead.
I've got a Teensy 4.1 board with a USB host cable to connect an IR touch frame through. The theory is that the touch frame would send data through the USB connection as though it was a mouse and as such can be treated like one in code. Teensy has example code for reading from a USB attached mouse (website says the lib is compatible with teensy 3.6 and 4.1) that leads me to believe that the same code can be used with the touch frame.
At this point, the only thing holding me back from buying a touch frame is this thread from a couple years ago that essentially concluded with "this isn't possible". In light of this, I figured I post here to see if anyone has had any experience with these touch frames and could sanity check my current plan. Am I on the right track here or is there something I'm missing?
My only other unknown would be the polling rate of the IR touch frame assuming I can read from it. In other words, would the Nerf dart be detected by the time it bounces off the target backboard and out of the touch frame.
There are surely tons of touch screen projects where You can pick up ideas.
Detecting darts hitting the board has also been asked many times before.
Do some searching. I'm sure You will find usefull info.
I appreciate the reply, but this is a bit of a non-answer. I've done my research and didn't find what I was looking for, which led me to post here.
Yes there are tons of touch screen projects, but the scope of these projects does not make them relevant to my project in the way I would need them to be. Most, if not all, use capacitive or resistive touch pads. In order to even be able to use the capacitive touch screens, I would need to modify every dart used with the system which is not an option I'm considering. For resistive touch pads, the commercial products that I've been able to find are not sensitive enough for this application. As I mentioned in my original post, the foam darts don't exert enough force on the touch pad to close the contacts and register a hit, even at point blank range. Short of manufacturing my own high sensitivity resistive touch pad, this option isn't going to work. This leads me to IR touch frames which show promise, but have little presence in the maker community from what I've found. There are a couple projects that talk about creating an IR touch frame from scratch, but I'd prefer to use the commercially available ones to reduce the amount of work I need to do.
Yes many others have asked about dartboard hit detection and there are also many projects out there for dartboards. But once again, the scope of these projects are different in a few ways:
Most dartboard projects are made for throwing darts, not Nerf darts. This immediately poses an issue for hit detection since throwing darts stay in the board while Nerf darts bounce off. This limits the options available for hit detection when compared to throwing darts.
Most dartboard projects that I've found make use of existing commercial electronic dartboards that detect hits within a zone rather than exact position. Furthermore, the detection is done with a custom version of a resistive touchpad that only has contacts at the corners of each zone and as such can't be used for exact location accuracy.
There are a couple projects that are Nerf-centric and have hit detection such as this star wars target game or this alarm clock project, but neither of them actually detect where they get hit. They make use of piezo-electric sensors to detect either a target getting hit or the frame of the clock. There's this forum post that discusses using multiple piezo sensors to pinpoint impact position in an archery setting, but the results seem inconclusive as of the latest post in the thread.
So again I pose my original question:
Does the plan of action I'm currently taking seem to have merit in terms of interfacing an IR touch frame as a mouse to my Teensy 4.1, or is there something I haven't thought about or an example project with similar functionality that I should look at?