Beautiful Replica Team Fortress 2 Weapons

March 6, 2013 by 16 Comments

gun

We’ve seen our share of replica props, but [Nathan]’s replica of the spy’s sidearm from Team Fortress 2 is the bee’s knees.

The build began as an off-the-shelf Airsoft gun. After removing the barrel and cylinder, [Nathan] used Apoxie Sculpt and a whole lot of sanding to turn a stock piece of metal and plastic into something that came straight from the Mann Co. store. The in-game version of the Ambassador also includes an engraving of the object of the spy’s affection, replicated by [Nathan] with some very careful Dremel work. Once the prop was done, [Nathan] built a mold box out of plywood and filled it with silicone rubber. This allowed him to make several castings of his prop weapon

This isn’t [Nathan]’s only TF2 replica prop; he also made a replica of the stock sniper gun and scout’s scattergun and a megaphone from Borderlands. In an effort to out do himself, [Nathan] is gearing to build a gun that fires two hundred-dollar, custom-tooled cartridges at ten thousand rounds per minute. He has yet to craft any hats.

GameGun Makes Call Of Duty More Immersive

September 16, 2012 by 10 Comments

In an effort to improve his Call of Duty gaming experience, Reddit user [Harbingerx81] built a custom controller out of an Airsoft gun. Not only does this gun feature all the buttons and joysticks normally found on a stock xbox controller, it’s also loaded up with accelerometers and gyros so his on-screen character points his gun wherever [Harbingerx] points his gun.

From the imgur album, we can see that [Harbingerx] modded an Airsoft gun with a few buttons, d-pads, and switches optimized for Call of Duty. What really gets us is the clever use of accelerometers and a gun-mounted HDMI display (with a wireless HDMI adapter) to provide a home-made virtual reality setup for one of the most popular games.

Building this controller/display wasn’t cheap – it cost [Harbingerx] upwards of $600. A good price, we’re thinking, since the Oculus Rift will be north of $300 along with the added cost of a gun-shaped xbox controller.

Hacking The AR Drone: Intro

August 23, 2012 by 46 Comments

Ever since we played with the original AR drone back at CES a few years ago, we’ve been keeping an eye on them. While we all agree there are better quadcopters out there, the price point for a ready-to-fly quadcopter of this size is really great with these.

When the fake video from FPS Russia of the weaponized drone made the rounds earlier this year, we were surprised at how people reacted. Anyone who has messed with quadcopters recognized it as fake right off the bat (not to mention the overly cliche fake russian character).

We won’t be adding a full fledged firearm to this. Mainly because it simply can’t lift the weight (There are ones that can, but we couldn’t justify the cost just for that). We do have some ideas though.

Lets go over the specs of the AR Drone 2.0 first.

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WISP Adds Wifi To The Internet Of Things

June 8, 2012 by 40 Comments

The guys over at embdSocial sent in a project they’ve been working on for a while. It’s a small wifi module for an Arduino or other microcontroller called Wisp. Unlike the many, many other wifi breakout boards we’ve seen, the Wisp has a truly incredible amount of potential. With an API that allows an Arduino to post to Twitter, sending text messages, and even has remote admin capabilities, the embedSocial team came up with something really cool.

We’ve seen our fair share of projects that use wifi, but the Wisp is amazingly clever as to how projects can be controlled. Each Wisp is administered through the Internet. Once a Wisp is registered to your online embdSocial account you can upload new code without ever physically connecting a microcontroller to your computer.

To demonstrate the remote administration capabilities of the Wisp, the embdSocial guys put an Arduino and Wisp inside an electrical junction box. With their setup, the guys have the simplest and smallest Internet connected power outlet we’ve ever seen.

After the break, you can see a demo of a Wisp opening a garage door and a remotely operated, web enabled airsoft turret. We’re loving that the turret sends video from the gun to any device on the Internet, and it’s impressive that [Chris] and [Art] whipped up both these projects in a single weekend. There’s also a Kickstarter for the Wisp, so here’s to hoping we can pick one of these up soon.

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Sentry Gun Controller-board Upgrade

March 29, 2012 by 18 Comments

This open source sentry gun controller board builds on a great concept by getting rid of the Arduino board. The previous version was an Arduino shield, but this upgrade keeps all of the cool features by rolling the necessary parts into one smaller footprint.

The image above doesn’t quite convey the scope of the project. Go take a look at the feature from last year which used the shield version of the controller. That build used a servo-mounted paintball gun in conjunction with a webcam. You can still build the same platform, but use the open-source files to include this board. It has outputs for three servo motors, and can also interface with airsoft or paintball guns which have their own electronic triggers and integrated batteries.

We always like to see the schematic for projects like this one. For your convenience we exported an image from the Eagle package. You can find it, along with the demo video, after the break.

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Laser Trip Wire In An Easy-to-use Form Factor

September 11, 2011 by 27 Comments

[Rul] built a nice laser trip wire alarm for use in Airsoft matches. Just place the enclosure so that the beam crosses a doorway and it will sound an alarm when the beam is broken. The only problem with this setup is that you need a reflective surface on the opposite side that can be positioned to direct the beam of light back to a photoresistor. But wait, there’s a second option. [Rul] also added a leaf switch that can be connected to an actual trip wire instead of using the laser.

A PIC 16F688 controls the laser module and monitors the photoresistor and leaf switch. When power is first switched on the box goes into a setup mode where it waits until the laser is detected by the photoresistor, switching on an LED to signal that you’ve got the beam aimed correctly. One press of the push-button puts it in activate mode which will sound the hacked window-alarm inside when the beam is broken. A toggle switch lets the operator chose between laser or wire operation.

You certainly won’t miss the alarm when it’s set off. Watch it scare the life out of a poor house cat in the clip after the break.

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Weekly Roundup 8/27/2011

August 27, 2011 by No comments


In case you missed them, here are our biggest posts from the past week.

For the weapons enthusiasts in our audience, make sure to check out our most popular post this week where [Liquider] shows a project in which an airsoft pistol was converted into a coil gun.

Our next most popular post was based around an xkcd comic where the concept of viewing clouds in 3D is explored using a pair of webcams. This post had lots of comments and also spawned a forum topic.

Next up is a post about a reward that has been place on the head of porting Android to run on a HP Touchpad. The bounty for all of the various challenges was originally $1500 but now sits at $2275!

This isn’t our normal fare since we usually don’t cover hacking that could be malicious. This post describes some of the exploits covered recently at Black Hat and Defcon.

Finishing up the pack is our own video where [Jack] shows how to build a stun glove and proves that it works by taking a jolt from it himself.