During our daily rounds we stumbled upon Duino Tag. Sure it’s not as awesome as a coil gun but it really sparked our imagination. First the base: an Arduino is wired up with IR LEDs and placed inside of a plastic pistol. A second Arduino with an IR receiver is scanning for the first Arduinos signal. A ’shot’ of IR light is ‘fired’ and detected, you get a ‘kill’.

The base is nothing amazing, but it really gives us some ideas and we would like to see it expanded upon. [J44] has already put in a piezo and other LEDs to simulate muzzle flash and other effects. But we like to go further. Start off with multiple pistols and players. Include GPS to track players current position, and wireless to update each player of another player. A small wrist watch display could act much like a UAV. Add some expansions like IR ‘grenades’ and you’ve got a full-out war! What would you like to see?

Some readers may remember [Paul] from his project Jak, the blackjack robot; but his interests have moved toward coil gun creation. Maggy, his latest weapon, may not be the prettiest of coil gun we’ve seen, or the most environmentally friendly, but does look to be promising. Featuring a triple stage, logic based accelerator instead of the typical single stage, it can fire a 10 gram projectile (theoretically) up to 85 km/h! Check out how he’s gone from a single pistol to his current monster on his site, and a video of his work in progress after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the best parts of building a coil gun is seeing just how fast you can get that slug to move through the air. [Daniel] built this speed meter to be able to see exactly that. It is comprised of two optical sensors, one at each end of a barrel. As the projectile passes them, its speed is calculated using an Atmega16. Since the distance between the sensors is pre determined, its only some simple math to figure out the speed of an object passing between them. The result is then displayed on a nice looking blue LCD.

If the blue accent lighting and acrylic stylings look familiar, that’s because we’ve seen [Daniel] before. He’s the one that built the portable coil pistol.

[via HackedGadgets]

While researching solid state Tesla coils we stumbled across this old project. As you have probably guessed from the pictures, this coil is meant to actually play music. Knowing how to add eye catching flare, the coiler uses a Plexiglas frame turned light pipe; only to be complimented by an audio amplifier complete with graphic equalizer. There is a video of the coil in action on YouTube. We have covered singing tesla coils in the past. Other twists on the classics include the tesla coil guitar amp and a hand held plasm gun.

TechEBlog has posted a few pictures of a student constructed coil gun. It’s bolt-action and includes a six round magazine. The gun only has a single stage to accelerate the projectile. While not as impressive as the portable coil pistol, it’s still more fun than most shop projects we’ve seen. You can find a video of the device below.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Daniel] had to have runaway in his mind when he built this coil gun. It’s hand held, holds 14 42 gram rounds and can propel them at speeds of 110km/h. Of course when it is battery powered, you have a 90 second warm up time between shots. It can also be used while plugged into a wall socket, which reduces the charge time to roughly 3 seconds. Great job [Daniel].

[via engadget]

[Rp181] has documented his entire rail gun build. He takes us through collecting the materials and assembling the system. It required 18 400V 3900uf capacitors to get the 5600 joules he wanted. It looks pretty impressive, though a video of it wreaking havoc on something might have been nice. We’ve seen rail guns before, from tiny ones for a robosapien to larger projects very similar to this one. In his instructable, he touts this as a “green” system. The capacitors are aluminum and no gun powder is required to move the projectile. Anyone want to do the math to figure out if it really is any better? Maybe if he’s collecting his energy via a giant solar panel.

[via instructables]

The registration desk hasn’t opened yet at ShmooCon 2009, but we’re already running into old friends. We found [Larry Pesce] and [Paul Asadoorian] from the PaulDotCom Security Weekly podcast showing off their latest ShmooBall gun. ShmooBalls have been a staple of ShmooCon from the very beginning. They’re soft foam balls distributed to each of the attendees who can then use them to pelt the speakers when they disagree. It’s a semi-anonymous way of expressing your dismay physically. [Larry] has been building bigger and better ways to shoot the ShmooBalls for the last couple years. You may remember seeing the 2008 model. This year the goal was to make the gun part much lighter. The CO2 supply is mounted remotely with a solenoid valve and coiled air line. The pistol grip has a light up arming switch and trigger. The gun is fairly easy to transport: the air line has a quick disconnect and the power is connected using ethernet jacks.

[thecapacity] sent us his iobridge project where he controls a coil gun with a Wiimote. To make the coil gun, he took apart an office golf putter that had a ball return.  The mechanism to return the ball is a metal cylinder that is moved magnetically. He simply replaced the cylinder with a smaller diameter piece of metal to create the gun.   His computer monitors the Wiimote axis changes and sends them to the ioBridge. The unit could be located anywhere, but without a camera on it, he’ll have a hard time aiming. There’s a video of it working after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Disposable cameras are quite cheap, and include circuitry that produces very high voltages. Because of this, they have been harvested for many projects. We’ve seen them used for coil guns and large high voltage power supplies, even for fixing rechargeable batteries that won’t charge. The latest in the long list of uses is to create nixie tube drivers. [the_don125] shows us how to use a single disposable camera to power 2 to 3 medium sized Nixie tubes. Be careful, as we said before, this project deals with high voltage.