Airsoft idea for my college project

TheDoc

My first day back in college and I'm told ive a whopper project to do with a group. And a few weeks to do it.

We are running short on ideas, and I had one myself.

How plausibly would it be to mount my g36c on some form of turret, and have it operated and controlled through a laptop, with mounting a camera on the gun also.

It would fit perfectly into the type of project we have to do, and tbh its more fun then coding programmes for hours and hours about ****e.

I know keith and richie have had some experience mounting turrets on simons wheelchair but if anyone can give me some sort of info it would be appreciated.

Cost and time are the two most important factors.

Cheers lads

kdouglas

Plausible? Well... er.. very, I've done it

Simon's chair uses some (fairly simple tbh) code written in C which is compiled and uploaded to a Make controller board (http://makingthings.com), this does some very simple translation of input from a PC joystick (values between 0 and 1024) and translates this into movement of the servo motors within pre-defined limts. The servo motors also take values between 0 and 1024 (actually, they can also take negative values and up as high as 1536) which conveniently means you can dump the value from the joystick straight to the motor and it will move.

I'm not too sure what programs are available for controlling servos directly via PC, but you will need some form of interface board anyway. If I was going to do it again, i'd use the Arduino controller (http://www.arduino.cc/) instead of the Make board, it's cheaper, smaller and appears to have much better community support.

There's some good inspiration for a design here: http://www.servocity.com/html/pan___tilt_packages.html and the motors used for Simon's project were bought from the same site (these ones: http://www.servocity.com/html/gdp985a-bm_pan_system.html)

Those motors are seriously well built and can take a ridiculous amount of weight, much more than a g36 would put on them tbh. Depending on what way you design your mount, you shouldn't have any problems using much lighter (and cheaper) motors.

For the firing mechanism, the guns are installed with a mosfet switch which is wired into the trigger switch on the joystick. This in turn also gives power to the motorized box mags (the box mags are powered from the AEGs battery also)

That's about it really. Building a decent mount is probably the hardest part, after that it's just software and wiring.

Puding

sounds liek a good project with a lot of areas for you to work on just be carful with the whole airsoft/college thing, aeg do not belong at college and i think most would have a problem with you bring them in if you had to, as long as you can work round that the idea is sound

kdouglas

Oh and I forgot about your idea with the video camera, that could be a simple little add-on which allows you to aim the gun remotely, or as suggested by dex in the off-topic thread, used for automatic aiming at moving objects.

Your best setup would likely be a nice java app on the laptop which has left/right/up/down controls which then interfaces with the arduino board to control the motors.

You could then use a usb web cam to display the picture from the camera inside your application.

Doing automatic aiming and such would have to be done from the laptop of course, the arduino doesn't have video processing capabilities.

weeder

been messing around with turrets for a while now, my best design ( although not very strong) has been a bluetooth controlled turret with a mini spycam on top

TheDoc

lecturer said if i could get an automated tracking system, hed give me an A straight up.

There will be no problem with the idea according to the lecturer, it can be brought into the presentation, or if it cannot due to weight, a video can be done from home.

Its not so much the coding part i think ill be alright for that, but its the actual turrets etc.

Are they going to be expensive etc, i get no funding from the college so its all outa my teams pocket. I want it to have the g36c.

I want it to auto-target...dno about auto fire.

Thanks for the replies keith, ill read into it more when i get home? but are the turrets going to set me back couple of hundred?

kdouglas

The rig i linked to above is for industrial camera use and can take ludicrous amounts of weight, a g36 doesn't weigh that much tbh. You could build a fairly decent/basic turret out of wood fairly easily and hook a couple of servo's to it.

It really depends on what you are going to get more credit for, design and build of a turret, or programming an automated tracking system. You're under time constraints aswell so the abilites of your design should reflect that.

Also have a look at http://www.thesentrygun.com/

Personally I'd go with a p90, because of it's size and shape it would be much easier to mount into a turret rig than most other AEGs.

TheDoc

the credit will be for programming and having the turret auto target fucntion working.

I'm reconsidering it already due to costs and physical building etc. It was a good idea at the start but it seems a bit too costly for a project.

Still considering it but i think it might be too much for me to handle.

theburi

I have started small project for automated turret with motion tracking some time ago. But had to stop due to lack of time. I used c# and there are few libraries on code project availabe that implement motion detection. The only thing I couldn't find coded is template matching to adjust background when gun moves. that will have to be implemented.
There is one guy and he had it done. http://www.thesentrygun.com/ you can try to contact him and get some ideas.

there few excellent Painball automated turrets but they are very expensive.

Cheeky monkey

Doc mabye to cut down cost try an aep

ED E

Saw a video of a PB one the other day, ran an onboard linux system, but they cost 3K.

Just looking at what KD said, a P90 seems like a good choice, and due to the location of the chamber you could make up a graity feeding hopper, save the hassle of winding.

Thinking on seans point if you had a blue tooth capable laptop it might be possible to link it via that, be a nice little touch.

weeder

nah, lethal. used a bluetooth PHONE!

kdouglas

Just a little tip which I'd apply to all projects, particularly this one; Keep it simple.

Bluetooth, wireless control, etc.. etc... dont bother, get the thing working first and if there is time add the fancy stuff.

NakedDex

First rule in electronics/engineering: Don't make the solution more complicated than the question.

I echo what kd said about the P90, to keep costs down, you can use a Well R90. They go for peanuts really. If you're doing a 2 axis control, a fire system wouldn't be hard either given you can replace the trigger with a transistor which takes a signal from the Make board kd mentioned above also.

The simplest and easiest option is to do a remote control system rather than automated. Automated would be excellent but it's a heck of a lot of work in a short space of time. To get a tracking system working effectively you need multiple sensors with good accuracy and a program to take the data from all sensors and interpret it into a coordinate. A good RF remote control system using a camera, a fast motor set up and a selectable fire control would be just as impressive if you could control it from, say, the next room. RF controller parts are easily found through r/c car and plane model shops.

theburi

Separate hardware and software.
don't go with facy stuff like wireles and microchip controllers
take servor controller linked to PC/laptop.
Once you get software written in high level language you can then start on microchips (if you have time). Java or .NET will al be able to work with servor controllers. and it is much easier to work with cameras. you can always use servor to push the trigger so you don't need any IO boards.

PM me if you need help with software. I may find some time to spare.

TheDoc

Was having trouble convincing the team to fund the project, but a little angel has come in with a lending hand, so this still might go ahead for me.

I have an idea for the build.

I'm still finding it hard to find information on what is what etc etc. You have to remember this is a big first time effort. I have only Java as a programming language to my name. I feel to be fair the college are asking alot, but this project for me seems like it might be feasible and that according to my lecturer will get me good grades.

The idea is having some sort of aeg(p90 mentioned) attached to a mount that can fully rotate 360 degrees around and 90% upwards. I'm going to keep it simple and have the targetting and firing controlled manually from a laptop. I still want to hookup a webcam to the aeg to allow for good targetting, also will look cool on the big presentation screen.

like i said im still having trouble understanding certain things. I need a motor device like keith linked above...but is this an actual pivoting mechanism? or does a turret need to to handbuilt and then put ontop of this motor device?

What are these servos used for? What programming language can be used to do these?
Is it a reasonible project for 3 3rd year IT students?

I've been burning around google etc but cannot find some definite info. I dont want someone to give me the exact details, i want to do this myself with my team, but we are really at a loss where to begin and what we have to do.

theburi

Not sure if you come across this
this site sells a kit for what you are looking for http://robotairsoft.com/

Here is robotic competition that uses airsoft to shoot targets http://defcon.org

if you search for defcon you can find description how teams build their units.