As we head into summer, Super Soakers and their ilk become de rigeur ways to cool off in the heat. Not content with chasing targets himself, [Marcel] instead built a sentry water gun to do his bidding.
The build is one that leverages typical 3D printer components to get the job done. A Minitronics 2.0 board is used to run the show, packing a 40 MHz SAMD21 microcontroller for plenty of grunt. It’s Arduino compatible too, making it easy to program. It’s combined with NEMA17 and NEMA23 steppers and an external driver board to slew the gun towards a target. Target detection is via a RPLIDAR A1, which detects the range of nearby objects. This data is used to calculate the pan angle and tilt required to hit the target with a stream of water, fired by a relay-controlled solenoid.
It’s a fun build that does a good job of soaking those playing by the pool. [Marcel] aims to do further work to improve performance by reducing backlash and increasing slew speed. Sentry guns are a forever popular build around these parts. Video after the break.
That’s just what I need to keep the birds from eating my grass seed. Gets rid of the birds and waters the lawn at the same time ;)
I has expecting one of the kids to get blasted into the pool.
Can we train it on cats?
You can train it to recognize everything :) In fact, the laser of the Lidar only “sees” closest object within certain threshold. Next update of software should also have some kind of immunity for the envoirement.
Could be used to spray (paint) intruders.