Raspberry Pi based Shooting Gallery Project for Nerf Blasters

This is a build video for a Raspberry Pi based shooting gallery for plinking cans that I made for use with Nerf blasters. I got to thinking building such a rig would be a really fun Raspberry Pi project. It features 8 game modes. 4 of the game modes are single player and the other 4 are two player modes. It utilizes 8 LM393 light sensors, with LEDs on the sensor PCBs removed to not exceed allowable current on the Raspberry Pi 3 A+'s 3.3V rail. Target cans sit atop those sensors.

The game utilizes CMU Flite for text to speech, for giving players instructions, prompting for input, and announcing scores and times. I also, with help from ChatGPT, have a Python script utilizing Vosk for voice activated control of the game. My voice control implementation isn't the best, but it's workable if in a quiet environment. As a challenge, and to keep build costs down, I wanted the project to remain headless, so no buttons or screens, with the only I/O devices being the light sensors, speakers, and mic. The unit will even shutdown on its own if left idle for 4 minutes, warning about shutdown after 3 minutes.

The shooting gallery game itself is written in C and currently stands at around 2,000 lines. The game starts automatically after OS boot (Raspberry Pi OS Lite) and asks for shooting distance to adjust scoring, plus asks for player name(s) and yes or no confirmations to questions. The unit is rigged to save a text log of matches to a USB flash drive, if one is plugged in at boot. There are also some player configurable options via text config file, such as which Flite voice to use (currently just "slt" or "kal16"), shooting distance, base shooting distance, and exponent for the point coefficient function, for adjusting the points exponentially with respect to shooting distance and base distance.

This project took a couple of weeks to build in my spare time. The total build cost is around $100, excluding some special tools needed, such as circular saw, drills, bits, 3D printer, and Dupont crimping tool. I probably spent double the build cost on a slew of Nerf Rival blasters to test it out with!

For more detailed build instructions and all source code, see my website here...

https://mikesshorts.com/misc/shootinggallery

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:32 Build Slideshow
2:15 Addressing Light Sensor Concerns
4:06 Game Modes
7:07 Trying it Out
9:08 Nerf Challenger
9:49 Nerf Pathfinder
10:37 Nerf Mirage

Видео Raspberry Pi based Shooting Gallery Project for Nerf Blasters канала Mike Young