The first challenge the team want to tackle is “The Duck Shoot” as this is new to this years event. The challenge involves shooting five targets down over three attempts.
Since the rules allow Nerf darts to be used, Phil went out a procured a nice looking, powerful gun!
The Strip down!
The only bit we need of the gun however is the dart holder and the firing mechanism. So the team set to work stripping this down and designing a robot mount that means we can add and remove the challenge components as we go.
The testing
One thing we need to be careful about, is power. If the device needs too much power we will need to change batteries too often, to little and we could miss the target. So to ensure that this is calculated, we need to test the power requirements.
In true maker spirit Keith brought a Bench power supply kit from eBay and tested the requirements of the Nerf motor
Bench testing the Gun
Motors pull 1.9A on spin up and then drop to 500mA. With my
New power supply I can limit to 600mA and it spins up nicely. I’ll have to see how I can do that in hardware to be kind to our Pi
So thew challenge here for us is to design a circuit to limit the power consumption of the motors.
Hopefully with the experts we have in the team, a nice tiny circuit will be designed that will help with the power.🤞
