Bonkers Nerf Blaster Sprays Balls Everywhere

Nerf blasters are fun toys, to be sure. However, they’re limited by factors like price and safety and what Hasbro thinks parents will put up with. Few caregivers would ever countenance a build like this one from [ItllProbablyWork].

It’s a blaster designed to fire 48 darts in a second or so, or a truly ludicrous 288 Nerf balls. Like so many rapid fire blaster designs, it’s based on a pair of rotating wheels which fling darts out at rapid speed. The trick to the rapid fire ability is the delivery of ammunition. In this case, the blaster has a rotating drum of 12 barrels, which can each be loaded with 4 darts or 24 balls. As the drum rotates into position, a trigger mechanism unlatches a spring which forces the contents of the barrel out through the wheels and on to the target.

It’s mostly pretty good with darts, but with balls, it tends to send them flying everywhere, including jamming a bunch into the blaster’s internals. It is very funny to watch, though.

We’ve seen some other great blaster builds recently, too. Video after the break.

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Dartboard Watches Your Throw; Catches Perfect Bullseyes

Some people really put a lot of effort into rigging the system. Why spend years practicing a skill and honing your technique to hit a perfect bullseye in darts when you can spend the time building an incredibly complicated auto-bullseye dartboard that’ll do it for you?

In fairness, what [Mark Rober] started three years ago seemed like a pretty simple task. He wanted to build a rig to move the dartboard’s bullseye to meet the predicted impact of any throw. Seems simple, but it turns out to be rather difficult, especially when you choose to roll your own motion capture system.

That system, built around the Nvidia Jetson TX1, never quite gelled, a fact which unfortunately burned through the first two years of the project. [Mark] eventually turned to the not inexpensive Vicon Vantage motion capture system with six IR cameras. A retroreflector on the non-regulation dart is tracked by the system and the resulting XY data is fed into MATLAB to calculate the parabolic path of the dart. An XY-gantry using six steppers quickly shifts the board so the bullseye is in the right place to catch the incoming dart.

It’s a huge amount of work and a lot of money to spend, but the group down at the local bar seemed to enjoy it. We wonder if it can be simplified, though. Perhaps tracking just the thrower’s motions with an IMU-based motion capture system and extrapolating the impact point would work.

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Pocket Dart/Spitball Gun For Wet/Dry Combat

What can you do with needles, disposable syringes, superglue, cotton swabs, and scissors? If you answered ‘get hassled by TSA agents’, you’d be right, but you could also do what [Mski] did and make a pocket dart gun!

[Mski] used a 10mL syringe and a clear BiC pen body. He glued the pen barrel to the needle adapter on the syringe to make the chamber. He made the darts by cutting cotton swabs in half and inserting glue-covered needles. If you’ve never cut a cotton swab in half, they are hollow inside. What he has there are actually straight pins, which are cheaper than needles and come in larger quantities. The good news is you can make a bandolier of darts without breaking the bank.

Load your gun by shoving spitballs and/or darts up the chamber with a thin wooden stick, like a bamboo skewer. If you use your wife’s knitting needle, we recommend putting it back where you found it.

Do you prefer flaming projectiles and find clothespins easier to come by? Are you a hemophiliac or needle-phobic? Make this mini matchstick gun instead.

Cheap Electronic Dartboard Hacked To Use Android For Scoring

[Dan] took a $13 electronic dartboard and made it work with an Android device. The idea behind it is that these cheap electronic models feature a very sparse display. At this price that doesn’t surprise us. He wanted to add the features you’d find on a coin-op model like the ones found in bars. So he added some hardware that lets him use Android as the scoreboard.

To do this all he needs is the ability to detect when a dart has hit the board and what value was registered. The board is really nothing more than a 62-button input device organized as an 8×8 matrix. He soldered jumpers between the pins and a DIP socket. After the work was done he programmed his Cordium BASIC microcontroller, a 28-pin chip, and dropped it right in. It communicates with a serial Bluetooth module which provides the connectivity with an Android phone. You can see a very quick clip of the app embedded after the break.

This would be just perfect if you’re using an Android set-top-box on a TV near the dart board.

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