Get Some Close Air Support With A Nerf Drone

Working from home has the major advantage of spending more time with loved ones, but it all that time can sometimes lead to friction. [Cory] found that Nerf battles with his kids is an effective way to blow off some steam, but felt he was getting a bit too much exercise in the process. Instead, he equipped an FPV quadcopter with a 3D printed Nerf gun to take his place.

Since manually reloading the Nerf gun after every shot wasn’t an option, he needed to create an autoloader. The darts are propelled by a pair of brushless drone motors mounted side-by-side, with just enough space for a dart the squeeze between. The motors are allowed to spin up, and then a dart is loaded servo-operated plunger, out of an off-the-shelf Nerf magazine. The motors ESCs and servo is controlled by an Arduino Nano, which receives the fire command from one of the spare outputs on the drone’s flight controller. To nerf gear is easily removable from the drone, so [Cory] to also fly the drone on more peaceful missions. See the video of one of the battles after the break. [Cory] might need to find an alternative control location to prevent himself being used as cover by his adversaries.

Nerf guns are a fun and harmless way to live out your sci-fi warfare fantasies, especially with the technology we have available these days. From FPV sentry guns to auto-aiming rifles, and heavy artillery, anything is possible.

 

12 thoughts on “Get Some Close Air Support With A Nerf Drone

    1. While I get the joke, it does seem like it might be helpful for conservationists. Tagging, sedating, medicating… Just not on people. Humans understand their decisions by and large, whatever way they may choose.

  1. It´s also much easier to achieve: detecting a red hat is much less resource-hungry than operating a fully fledged face recognition engine. That means no need for a costly Nvidia Jetson, much lighter aircraft, and better autonomy, longer reach.

  2. Wow a lot of comments got nerfed!

    Could it deliver vaccine inhalers (they’ve just been in the news as a possible thing)? Might be packable in a nerf type envelope and be more sociably acceptable thing than a syringe to the face. Though I support the sentiment.

    Perhaps a perfectly normal nerf dart to the face to anyone with their nose poking over the top of a mask. That irks me much. Why bother wearing a mask covering the part of your face your not breathing through? Not to be too righteous, but unleash the foam chaos!

    It’s an immensely cool nerf drone :)

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