Sweet, finally an Arduino hack I can get into. Everyone, go shoot your Arduinos.

Bobby: what are you talking about? He’s making a PCB and paying for his project research all while offering the plans online freely. If you want to build one cheaper he’s letting you do it. If you want the convenience of someone else building it for you then buy it from him. Where exactly is the rip-off?

Bobby, you’re an idiot.

1) Do you think a $20 costs more than $1 to make? Point being that if he sold them for parts cost, or even double parts cost, he wouldn’t make any money. I think this gadget is worth much more than $20. Discuss.

2) If you think it’s expensive, buy it elsewhere.

What Osgeld said. Make a better design at the same price or cheaper.

Anyhow, I have my doubts that this would work (or that it would be practical) to use with a real firearm, I say this because it would be difficult to make the bullet break both beams and hit a target traveling any significant distance. If you shoot things from very close range you get a different outcome as well as more mess/danger possibility.

The “$20″ was a typo. I checked out the store and the Camera Axes cost $200.

Note that the parts kits cost $95. Looks like the guy is hand-assembling them and charging premium prices.

But whatever, who cares if it is like $60000… no one is forcing you to buy.

Anyone else notice how the summary is careful never to mention the Arduino by name, and just says “microcontroller”?

Guess that is the new way of sneaking them in. With any luck, members of the Arduino Assault Force will be too lazy to read the actual page and not notice. Especially when it is sitting between two other Arduino posts.

You don’t need an arduino to take photos like this. You can get kits for $15 that use lasers and achieve the exact same effect. I personally used a sound based trigger, and I can get amazing photos for about $15. A glass with a spiderweb shatter, http://bit.ly/7xlRRp

I like the idea, and like what he is doing. However, I too doubt the ability of opto sensors mounted on a PC board to pick up bullets.
There are chronographs specifically for measuring bullet speeds already. They are accurate and cheap, and they have tall spread antennae to shoot between so as to eliminate the need to literally graze a circuit board with a bullet.
Could someone better at interfaces than I am simply strip the value from an existing off-the shelf chronometer to do the same thing? You could add a header to the board or even strip the value from the output sent to the chrono’s LCD.
Could even just build a new camera trigger board using whatever radio frequency system a chrono already does.
Million ways to skin that cat, all of them better than skimming along a bullet millimeters over a board. The bow shock of a supersonic bullet (most any bullet then) would shatter it anyway just from air pressure.

Hi guys, I think the pcb design would work fine for real bullets. This sensor goes pretty close to the barrel of the gun so I don’t think you would hit the board with a bullet. I know I never had a problem with this and I use using a ball bearing that is larger than most bullets. If you mount a gun on a firm stand and line everything up I just don’t see it being a problem. That said there are screw terminals on the board so it’s trivial to add in some wires to move the IR emitter and transistor to a farther distance from the board.

By using sky screens like a chronograph, you might be able to adapt this sensor to look “up” the way a chronograph does. Most actually work by sensing the shadow of the projectile as it passes by. I used to 1st chrono BB’s years ago w/an old Chrony setup. That way I could be fairly sure I wasn’t going to trip the sensors directly w/a 230 grain circuit interrupter when doing it for real.