[Snypercat] makes no bones about the fact that she despises rats, and does everything in her power to keep them off her farm. We can’t blame her though – they spread disease, eat other animals’ food, and can get your farm shut down if there are too many running about. While most of us might hire an exterminator or set out a ton of traps, she chooses to take a far more hands-on approach, hunting down each and every one of those little buggers with an air rifle.

If you’ve ever gone rat hunting in the dark (and who hasn’t?), you know that it can be difficult to aim in the dead of night. Night vision scopes can be expensive, but [Snypercat] shows how you can make your own scope that gives you the added benefit of recording your kills along the way. She happened to have a Sony camcorder with built-in night vision capabilities, and with a bit of tweaking she was able to mount it on her rifle’s scope. An IR flashlight was mounted on the rifle as well, giving her enhanced visibility without spooking her prey.

Be sure to check out the pair of videos below to see how [Snypercat] attached the camcorder to the scope, along with how well it works in the field.

[via HackedGadgets]

[Drake] wrote in to share his recent project, which involves repurposing an Airsoft rifle that was sitting around, collecting dust. Airsoft guns as a whole are not all that impressive, but convert your Airsoft gun into a laser rifle, and we’re all ears.

His laser blaster is honestly pretty straightforward as far as laser projects go, but we just couldn’t resist. He pulled apart the Airsoft gun, removing all of the “airy” bits, leaving just the trigger behind. He added a 9v battery and a linear power supply to the gun, wiring them up to a 700mW laser diode from what we hope was a broken Blu-ray burner.

In the obligatory “look at what I can destroy with my laser gun” video embedded below, [Drake] shows off his gun’s potency at various ranges, popping balloons from 35 feet away. He even shows off the laser’s usefulness as a light pen for glow in the dark surfaces.

While his modifications are nothing we haven’t seen before, his gun is far more accessible than others we have featured.

Have any cool high-powered laser projects of your own? Share them with us in the comments.

This collection of gauss weapons use rare earth magnets to accelerate projectiles to damaging speeds. They work using the same concepts as a coil gun, but instead of just one projectile travelling along a length of guide track, there are many projectiles that work in a chain reaction. A series of magnets are placed at equal distances along the track. Each has a couple of large ball bearings on the muzzle side of the magnet. The first ball bearing is fired using mechanical force – like a spring mechanism – and accelerates as it approaches the magnet due to the attractive force of that magnetic field. When it impacts the magnet it sends one of the ball bearings on the opposite side down the track where it will accelerate when it nears the next magnet in the chain. The weapon above achieves a final projectile speed of about 68 miles per hour, breaking six fluorescent tubes in a row on at the right side of the apparatus.

Still prefer rail guns that use electromagnets? Check out this gauss pistol kit that is about as powerful as a BB gun.

[Philysteak527] modified a Nerf rifle, making it semi-automatic thanks to the powers of compressed air. This is not a simple change to make, and rests on his ability to design and manufacture a bolt-action that fits in the gun, works with the Nerf ammo, and uses a CO2 canister and solenoid valve for the firing action. Knowing that, it’s not surprising to find that he’s an engineering student at Stony Brook University. He started with some POM, or polyoxymethylene plastic sold under the brand name Delrin, and used a CNC lathe to machine the parts for the bolt. Add in some brass fittings, a solenoid, tubing, and the electronics and you’re in business.

We’ve embedded the test footage after the break. Looks like the new internals allow a rather fast firing rate (maybe 2-3 shots per second?) and achieve a distance between seventy and one hundred feet.

These aren’t terrorists, they’re electrical engineering students. For their final project they developed a headband and rifle input system for the NES. The controllers send data to a laptop which then maps out the inputs to NES controller commands and sends them to an original NES console, no emulation here.

The controllers in the headband and rifle are Firefly sensor network nodes. Originally, [Kevin] and [Evan] tried using accelerometers for motion information but found the data do be unreliable. After an upgrade to gyroscope modules the interface is much more responsive, as seen about 3:50 into the video after the break. We like seeing motion controller hacks and we appreciate the choice of a classic system (and lesser known game title). This really makes it a whole different game.

Minifigs beware, something’s afoot. This LEGO sniper rifle is in talented hands to clean up those problem areas. [Jack Streat] put together this fascinating build as well as the delightful demo after the break. The bolt pulls a 1×4 block out of the eight-round magazine and loads it into the chamber. A pull of the trigger flings it with surprising accuracy. Want to be the coolest parent ever? Forgo the store-bought toys this year and put one of these together for your kid. Just don’t turn them into Private Pyle (NSFW).

[Thanks Gabe via TBT]

This gun hunts only RFID tags.[mnt], who brought us laser gesture control, built this RFID Zapper but included so much more. Any good weapon has to sound mean, a feat he’s accomplished by incorporating an MP3 player into the rifle. The coil that zaps the RFID tag is powered by a photo-flash unit, but for visual feedback he’s got a second unit that flashes light to signal the demise of your German passport (see the video after the break).

It’s hard to believe we haven’t covered RFID Zappers yet. The concept came out of the Chaos Communication Congress a few years back. This method works by sending a very strong electromagnetic field through the RFID tag that causes it to burn out. There’s a wiki post on RFID Zappers but Firefox threw a certificate warning when we loaded it up; read at your own risk.

If modding your M-16 to be a DeWalt power tool is just too manly, you could always go with the Hello Kitty AR-15.