nerf

58 Articles

Modding A Nerf Blaster The Old Fashioned Way

September 3, 2023 by 3 Comments

The Pistol Splat was a very weak blaster built for children, designed to shoot toy-grade paintball-like ammunition. [Matt Yuan] recognised the potential of the single-shot design, though, and repurposed it as a powerful Nerf blaster.

The blaster is a simple spring-plunger design. Upon pulling the trigger, the spring drives the piston forward, shooting the ammunition out the barrel. As stock, the Pistol Splat featured an incredibly strong spring and an unrestricted barrel, giving it plenty of performance capability. With some finagling, it’s capable of shooting a Nerf dart at 100 feet per second in stock form.

[Matt] improved the blaster by removing its dry-fire protection spring, which consists of a second spring to resist the plunger’s motion. Modification also involved fitting a barrel sized to properly seal on the darts. These two mods boosted the dart velocity to 110 feet per second. Adding a spacer to ensure the spring fully drove the piston forward for its full travel further boosted the dart velocity to a mighty 145 feet per second.

It bears noting that serious Nerf blasters like these demand eye protection. Video after the break.

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High Quality 3D Scene Generation From 2D Source, In Realtime

September 2, 2023 by 28 Comments

Here’s some fascinating work presented at SIGGRAPH 2023 of a method for radiance field rendering using a novel technique called Gaussian Splatting. What’s that mean? It means synthesizing a 3D scene from 2D images, in high quality and in real time, as the short animation shown above shows.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are a method of leveraging machine learning to, in a way, do what photogrammetry does: synthesize complex scenes and views based on input images. But NeRFs work in a fraction of the time, and require only a fraction of the source material. There are different ways to go about this and unsurprisingly, there tends to be a clear speed vs. quality tradeoff. But as the video accompanying this new work seems to show, clever techniques mean the best of both worlds.

A short video summary is embedded just below the page break. Interested in deeper details? The research PDF is here. The amount of development this field has seen is nothing short of staggering, and certainly higher in quality than what was state-of-the-art for NeRFs only a year ago.

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Escalate The NERF Arms Race With Self-Firing Missiles

June 27, 2023 by 2 Comments

NERF guns are a toy that appeals to adults and youngsters alike — if you’ve never had the chance to pelt your friends with safe and kid friendly foam darts in a surprise ambush, you haven’t lived. But just as with real-world weapons of the type superpowers put in shows of military strength, there’s an arms race in the world of NERF. Mere darts aren’t enough, and there’s a range of missiles for the bellicose youngster intent on skirting the brink of global foam dart annihilation. These come with a catch though in the shape of a lackluster launcher, and this has prompted [Joel Creates] to create a self-firing NERF missile with a secondary rocket motor.

A supercapacitor stores enough energy to light a small scrap of guncotton explosive when sent through a heater coil, and this should be enough to launch the missile. Perhaps this whole video should sit in “Don’t try this at home kids” territory, but try he does, with multiple dead ends along the way. The final try is a secondary rocket motor inside the missile that’s triggered by a micro switch upon leaving the standard NERF launcher. It’s not a resounding success, but we’re sure you’ll agree it’s an entertaining video to get there.

We’ve featured quite a few NERF hacks over the years, including this large auto-aimer.

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Robot Nerf Alarm Blasts You Awake With Foam

January 21, 2022 by 11 Comments

The sentry gun targets [Vinnie] with blasts of foam as he runs through the bedroom to the sounds of Your New Morning Alarm by [Marc Rebillet].
Waking up is hard; sometimes you need more than a little chiming alarm to get you out of bed. When [Vinnie Satriale] started unconsciously switching his alarms off, he went all out, deciding to build a Nerf sentry blaster to wake him up instead. 

A Nerf Rival Nemesis MXVII-10K flywheel blaster is the core of the build, with a 100-round capacity of soft foam balls. Stepper motors are used to control a pan and tilt system to aim the blaster. It’s moved under instruction from a Raspberry Pi that uses machine vision algorithms running on a Coral USB accelerator to track targets in the bedroom. A relay board is then used to activate the blaster’s firing action, blasting any targets until they wake up.

[Vinnie] had plenty of fun during build, also showing the sentry gun off to his coworkers in the office. It’s a hard sentry to dodge, with the machine vision algorithm using a full-body tracking model, so merely covering one’s face won’t be enough to get away.

We’ve seen all kinds of sentry guns over the years, from those firing rubber bands to others spraying jets of water. Video after the break.

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A Nerf Ball Turret Complete With FPV

July 23, 2021 by 2 Comments

Sentry turrets have long been a feature of science fiction films and video games. These days, there’s nothing stopping you from building your own. [otjones99] has done just that, with his FPV Nerf Ball launcher.

The system works on the basic principle of launching soft foam balls via a pair of counter-rotating wheels. It’s a remarkably simple way of electrically launching projectiles without a lot of fuss and mucking around, and it works well here. A blower fan is used to gently roll ammunition towards the launcher wheels as required. There’s a hopper-style clip which uses a servo to drop one ball at a time into the launching tube.

An Arduino Uno is responsible for slewing the turret, and handling the firing process. A joystick is fitted with an NRF24L01 radio module to send signals to the Arduino to aim the turret, while an FPV camera mounted on the turret allows the user to remotely see what the turret is aiming at. With a simple pull of the joystick’s trigger, the turret opens fire.

It’s a fun build, and one that shouldn’t do too much damage to anything given the soft pliable nature of the Nerf ammunition. Of course, if you don’t want to aim your turret yourself, you can always go ahead and build yourself an automated sentry gun. Video after the break.

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A Capable Nerf Launcher Robot

July 12, 2021 by 5 Comments

Nerf blasters are fun to play with, and it’s now possible to even get robotic Nerf launchers you can use to chase around your friends. [Engineering After Hours] wasn’t satisfied with the official hardware, though, so built his own remote control Nerf rig to battle it out in the back yard.

The rig is built around an earlier build from [Engineering After Hours], a skid-steer RC chassis that is nice and tough to handle rough and tumble driving. It’s paired with a trailer attached to the center of rotation of the chassis that makes the pair highly maneuverable.

In order to launch rockets, an air tank on the trailer is hooked up to some piping to launch four Nerf rockets. Charged up to just 40 psi, it’s capable of launching the rounds with plenty of power for play purposes. Paired with a elevation control and a servo to trigger the firing valve, it’s a complete system that can shoot on the go.

It’s a fun build that packs a punch, even if it doesn’t quite have the accuracy or range you might desire in an all-conquering Nerf combat platform.  We’d love to see a similar build hooked up to some AI smarts to stalk targets independently of human control. Video after the break.

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Auto-Aiming Nerf Gun To Give You The Edge In Battle

June 3, 2021 by 13 Comments

Ever wished for some robotic enhancements for your next nerf war? Well, it’s time to dig through the parts bin and build yourself a nerf gun with aimbot built right in, courtesy of [3Dprintedlife]. (Video, embedded below.)

The gun started with a design borrowed from [Captain Slug]’s awesome catalog of open source nerf guns. [3Dprintedlife] modified the design to include a two-axis gimbal between the lower and the upper, driven by a pair of stepper motors via an Arduino. For auto-aim, a camera module attached to a Raspberry Pi running OpenCV was added. When the user half-pressed the trigger, OpenCV will start tracking whatever was at the center of the frame and actively adjust the gimbal to keep the gun aimed at the object until the user fires. The trigger mechanism consists of a pair of microswitches that activate a servo to release the sear. It is also capable of tracking a moving target or any face that comes into view.

We think this is a really fun project, with a lot of things that can be learned in the process. Mount it on a remote control tank and you’d be able to wage some intense battles in your backyard. All the files are available on GitHub.

You are never too old for a good old nerf battle. Whether you want to be a sniper, a machine gunner, or a heavy weapons specialist, there’s a weapon to build for every role.