Sechism Sniper | Devpost

The Sniper
The Sniper
Nerf Gun We Hijacked
Team Photo
Homepage

Inspiration

Our inspiration was due to our friend’s experiences with dealing micro-aggressions and we wanted to do something to combat it.

What it does

Our gender discrimination gun fires projectiles at people who are being rude. We use a camera and microphone to capture a photo and listen to see if you are saying anything offensive. If you are deemed as an “offender”, you will get shot with the projectile by the gun. We also have a leaderboard which keeps track of known offenders and will shoot them onsite. There is a feature included where you can pay money to improve your score and all proceeds will go to helping women in need.

How we built it

The gun was built by hijacking and harvesting parts from the Fortnite SCAR nerf gun. We cut the power supply and used the flywheel from the nerf gun to shoot our projectiles which were loaded using a solenoid. We had to solder wires to the flywheel which was then connected to the ESP32. This project involved using two ESP32 microcontrollers, one that acted as the “brains” to control the timing and pulsing of the solenoid and the flywheel. The other ESP32 was used for power management to power the flywheel itself. Some hardware components that were used were a 2N2222 transistor that acted as a switch to turn on and off the solenoid and flywheel and a diode to prevent back emf from damaging the solenoid, flywheel, microcontrollers, and transistors. The construction of the gun required a lot of arts and crafts, utilizing cardboard and tape.

Challenges we ran into

For hardware, this was the first time that we had ever reversed engineered something. This involved taking apart the nerf gun and testing all the components to understand what their function was and to see what we could harvest for ourselves. Originally, we had planned to use one ESP32, but were running into power management issues. To pivot, we had to use an additional ESP32 solely just for powering the flywheel. The main issue that we had was with the solenoid itself as the stroke length was only 4mm, making it extremely weak as we had come into the hackathon with the idea that it could push and load bullets at a high clip.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Hardware: I am proud that we were able to have a functioning gun, though we had to take apart the entirety of the nerf gun itself. As we were limited by the hardware that we had, we were still able to have a comprehensive system of hardware that was able to still shoot the projectile.

What we learned

Hardware: I learned how to reverse engineer something as it was something that I did not have much experience in. There are no schematics of nerf guns so I had to learn how to test each component without destroying the gun itself.

What's next for Sechism Sniper

From a hardware standpoint, I would like to design a way to automatically load the bullets into the flywheel instead of having to manually load the projectiles each time. Ideally we would have to spec better solenoids that would help with this issue of loading bullets.