Video games, movies, and modern militaries are all full of robotic gun turrets that allow for remotely-controlled carnage. [Paul Junkin] decided to build his own, albeit in a less-destructive paint-hurling fashion.
The turret sits upon a lazy susan bearing mounted atop a aluminium extrusion frame. A large gear is mounted to the bearing allowing the turret to pan when driven by a stepper motor. A pair of pillow block bearings hold a horizontal shaft which mounts the two paint markers, which again is controlled by another stepper motor to move in the tilt axis. An ESP32 microcontroller is responsible for running the show, panning and tilting the platform by commanding the large stepper motors. Firing the paintball markers is achieved with solenoids mounted to the triggers, which cycle fast enough to make the semi-auto markers fire in a way that almost feels like full-auto. Commanding the turret is via an Xbox One controller; communicating with the ESP32 over Bluetooth using the BluePad32 library.
It’s worth noting you shouldn’t shoot paintballs at unsuspecting individuals, since they can do extreme amounts of damage to those not wearing the proper protection. We’ve featured a great many other sentry guns over the years, too, like this impressive Portal-themed build. Video after the break.
Looks like a fun project, but scary to think about what the implications are for how simple this kind of technology is nowadays.
It needs a camera so you can use FPV goggles to aim it.
Not many steps away from turning it into pure terror by an AI enemy detection and elimination of the threat.
Heck, with the open source Codeproject.ai, my camera software already can determine if there’s a human in frame, and it does it in under 30ms using an 11 year old computer with 11 year old NVidia Quadro K2200 GPU. There’s some latency in the network, but in very little time you can identify a human in range.
There’s a module for face detection, though I haven’t played with it; you could register friendly faces, and have it shoot any human-shaped thing it didn’t recognize.
Perfect for Halloween !
Of course, he’ll be blown away by someone controlling theirs with a mouse.
Hahaha! Our prowess is unmatched.
The XBox… The self acclaimed righteous marines of the gaming community.
Versus the PC… The scoundrels, pirates, and hidden shadows of your worst nightmares. The unmatched. The rebels of your grand war. Hahahaha! 🖥️💀🖥️