Badass. That’s the best documentation I think I’ve seen yet on any of these auto-turret projects.

Posted at 11:12 am on May 17th, 2009 by M4CGYV3R

Looks very good. Shows a lot of promise.

Posted at 11:14 am on May 17th, 2009 by Incubus

another gem from caleb kraft and his lack of spell check… the title of the video _clearly_ says ’sentry’ whereas mr. kraft titled the article ‘centry’ … amazing

Posted at 11:14 am on May 17th, 2009 by an4rk

I bet this could be easily modified for paintball for all those paintball freaks.

and maybe even for home defense to “mark” the culprit with paint. I’m thinking back-yard sentry or front yard that’s fenced in.

oh yeah… first real post :-p

Posted at 11:15 am on May 17th, 2009 by sly

spellcheck title ;)

Posted at 11:15 am on May 17th, 2009 by pod

ok… nevermind… 4 people posted at the same time… gotta love the internets

Posted at 11:15 am on May 17th, 2009 by sly

“more interesting voice options…” anyone else think of the Portal turrets?

Posted at 11:23 am on May 17th, 2009 by abumaia

@an4rk
_thanks_ …most helpful it has been fixed…

Seriously though, I have to look over these better.

Posted at 11:44 am on May 17th, 2009 by Caleb Kraft

NERF ENGINEERS

Posted at 11:48 am on May 17th, 2009 by Mike

easily the coolest nerf mod ever invented. ever

Posted at 12:01 pm on May 17th, 2009 by cyc4015

I felt ill when I saw a National Instruments USB-6008/9. Use a labjack instead of that overpriced crap, please!

Posted at 1:01 pm on May 17th, 2009 by cd0

I already owned the NI DAQ from a previous research project, so it made sense to use it.

Posted at 1:09 pm on May 17th, 2009 by Jeremy

Spy sappin’ my sentry!

Posted at 1:16 pm on May 17th, 2009 by Skwibow

I can’t believe it. More guns… same discussion we had with the portable coil pistol (may 7). check my comment and nubie’s comment about guns and the imagination… and then don’t wonder why so many people get killed here in the USA… http://hackaday.com/2009/05/07/portable-coil-pistol/

Posted at 1:43 pm on May 17th, 2009 by sansan

sansan. do you really believe nerf guns contribute to violence?

Posted at 1:59 pm on May 17th, 2009 by Dirk

omgzz we haz to explode all gunz or they will come kill us all!!!

How does we do it? Magicz?

Posted at 2:33 pm on May 17th, 2009 by xrazorwirex

Good presentation, but I had one small thought about the language used; It was said “basically” then there proceeded to be a paragraph of description describing how some thing worked and was sending signals. This happened twice and didn’t sound very basic to me.

Other than by regular bsing (above) I think you did a very awesome job with this. Physics book for the win!

Posted at 2:58 pm on May 17th, 2009 by Louis II

Nice work. I’m surprised they got the thing to turn at all with the servo. The image recognition over video is pretty cool too. Maybe when they take an ece class they’ll ditch the national instruments USB 6008/9 (or labjack, if that’s your thing) and just do servo control with a microcontroller over serial.

Posted at 3:48 pm on May 17th, 2009 by andrew

badge recognition? yeehaw!
Thatt’l stop that durn red spy from getting so close to my sentry!

Posted at 7:43 pm on May 17th, 2009 by Blue Engineer (Gilliam Vespa)

am I the only one who found the mention of the napkin holders at 3:35 hilarious.

Posted at 8:27 pm on May 17th, 2009 by sean

we couldn’t use a microcontroller because 1) this was supposed to be a matlab project, and 2) the setup we had (webcam and NI usb) worked fine and we had already spent enough money.

abumaia: you can easily change the sounds by substituting in different wavs in the sounds folder :)

Posted at 8:41 pm on May 17th, 2009 by jason

Am I the only one to notice the music selection ruined the entire thing. Ick… Great job on the hardware/software of the project but I digress.

Posted at 10:01 pm on May 17th, 2009 by Mr.Metro

They made an automated nerf sentry gun with tracking and recognition capabilities and the only thing they can be called on are grammatical errors?

-and what music they chose for the video?
-really?

Looks like the only thing you really need to do is a little proof reading on your presentation.
That’s like 5 minutes and doesn’t even involve the project itself.

I’d call that pure -= win =- fellas.

pure win.

Congrats on an awesome project.

Posted at 6:12 am on May 18th, 2009 by strider_mt2k

-and yes:
Best presented and best done sentry gun thus far.

Posted at 6:13 am on May 18th, 2009 by strider_mt2k

Why is it that the lag on these “sentry” systems is so bad that even an out of shape person can dodge the aiming.

Put decent servos in there and either put in decent processing or close the loop tighter on the tracking. it should adjust aiming 60 times a second at least.

The phalanx auto guns reassess aiming 240 times a second

Posted at 6:25 am on May 18th, 2009 by fartface

Very cool project Great Job!

Posted at 9:57 am on May 18th, 2009 by Billy

i was hoping for robocop sound effects personally. “you have 15 seconds to comply”

you could also use proportional navigation for better tracking. like a sidewinder

http://science.howstuffworks.com/sidewinder6.htm

Posted at 10:32 am on May 18th, 2009 by bhartley

Ingenious!

@sansan
I’m sorry that you, or someone you know, has obviously suffered some loss at the hands of a nerf-gun wielding maniac, but I think that you lack what we living in free countries like to call “perspective”.

@mr.metro
You’re right; that music was AWESOME!

Posted at 11:09 am on May 18th, 2009 by Arthur Grumbine

Now all we need to do is build a Nerf sapper and we’ll be all set!

Posted at 11:39 am on May 18th, 2009 by Anonymous

Extremely badass, but it kills me that the kid talking about the software spent more time showing the different color schemes (“and this one looks like Star Wars”) than on how the target recognition works.

Posted at 12:45 pm on May 18th, 2009 by Todd Grigsby

You are in direct violation
of penal code 27 section C.

- You have five seconds to comply.

- Four, three, two, one.

I am now authorized
to use physical force.

Posted at 1:08 pm on May 18th, 2009 by ED209

I would guess the reason the turret is slow to respond has to do with Matlab’s Image Aquisition Toolbox. I was playing around with it for a purpose similar to this and found it extremely clunky.

I gotta agree on the presentation, best sentry doc so far but still lacking alot of technical information.

Posted at 1:25 pm on May 18th, 2009 by Bushi

must of been patronizing to go around picking up all those darts. that was always my least favorite part of nerf wars. I say get a roomba with dart recognition software to suck them up and bring them back!

Posted at 1:55 pm on May 18th, 2009 by sheldonjames

“do you really believe nerf guns contribute to violence?”

In this country, we’re allowed to bear arms to protect ourselves from nerfiggas.

Posted at 11:42 pm on May 18th, 2009 by no_nerfiggas

I want one of those for my lab! That’ll teach the maintenance people to just walk in and start messing around near our million dollar equipment without calling ahead first.

Posted at 2:28 am on May 22nd, 2009 by pseudoanonymous coward

But why does it take crotch shots???

Posted at 11:11 am on May 24th, 2009 by Rober

Slow aiming is forgivable. MATLAB is *slow*, and there’s not a heck of a lot you can do to get away from that. If you implemented it in something less bloat-tastic, i’m sure you could make it much quicker.

Posted at 6:05 am on May 25th, 2009 by naxxtor

now make it controllable via internet… (gut a mobile security cam use it’s motor with the cam, Make sure you use one that can be connected to by the internet…)

Posted at 6:02 pm on May 26th, 2009 by Awsome

Hey guys,

Great job guys! Did y’all use LabVIEW?

You can use the inputs on that 6009 instead of that stamp to control the limits.

Posted at 5:56 pm on Sep 10th, 2009 by John S

How is this useful to any of our current common needs?

Posted at 4:11 am on Sep 11th, 2009 by Erik Källman