[Gabe’s] been wanting to do some embedded development for years, and his other hobby of playing paintball recently provided him with a test project. He’s been working on a custom driver board for his paintball gun. Don’t be confused by the name, GCode is a mash-up of his name and the fact that he wrote the code for the project. It has nothing to do with the G Code CNC language.
At first this might seem like a trivial hack, but this Viking paintball gun has some serious velocity and throughput so he needs a reliable control that won’t just start shooting randomly. Another thing that [Gabe] took into consideration was monitoring the loading process to make sure the paintball is full seated before firing. All of this is handled by that tiny little Femtoduino board. it interfaces with the guns hardware using the connector board mounted above it.
There are several videos sprinkled throughout the build log. But we found the officially sanctioned 12.5 balls per second mode and the ridiculously fast auto-fire clips the most interesting. It should come in handy when on the run from paintball shotgun wielding opponents.
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Love it!
Nice. I have 2 electronic paintball guns and I’ve been thinking of doing something similar.
How about a X-Y mount and graphic printing, building sized!
My friend, Rick, uses the Propeller to run a 6-barrel paintball Gatling gun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOkw1lMGsfw
ok now I feel old. I remember when they banned the semi-autos from play because they were “unfair”…and the only semi-auto was the tippman SMG-68..if you could find one. the SMG-62’s were available, but no one carried .62 cal paintballs…and you had to use field paint. I stopped playing when everyone went to “speedball”…my old bones just don’t move that fast anymore.
I love reading comments like these. Just two years ago I was at a car show and came across a rusted up SMG-60 (the -60 was the .62 cal. version, strangely) under a pile of junk someone was selling. The guy was prepared to let me have it for a dollar, but I told him that wouldn’t be fair and paid $10 for it. (I did end up having to put quite a lot of work into the thing, and it did not have any clips for it, so I think what I paid for it was pretty fair.)
Hah. I have a viking and have wanted to make my own board for a while now. I recognized the marker just from the photo above (Even though his is custom milled)
sounds like a douchebag
…says the douchebag commenter.
I wish I could make my own board. I’ve dabbled around with making one before but unfortunately I was unsuccessful..