In this project I’m trying to build an automated NERF blaster, or more generic “Foam Dart Flinger”.
Since just shooting darts with muskel power is somewhat boarding, this build should feature electrically powered fly wheels which are cpable of not only shooting one dart at a time, but a bunch of them as quickly as possible.
One of the builds I want to take inspiration from is the FDL-3-Blaster (sadly discontinued as a product as far as I understand it, but available as open source on GitHub). This design features, amoung other things, flywheels powered by brushless outrunner motors (as they are usually used in quadro copters) compared to the usually used small DC motors. It also has quite the advanced electronic controller, which allows customisation of parameters like “dart velocity”, “rate of fire”, “single, burst, auto fire”, etc. I’m a big fan of custmizable gadgets, so I will try to integrate at least some of these features in my build.
For the overall design I want to go for a kind of bullpup design, like the MHR-B2 (which I find looks really cool) or maybe a kind of P-90 design like the Bulwark. Espacially the idea of having the magazine with the darts mounted on top and lengthwise to the blaster like the Bulwark does it sounds really cool. I want to use Slanted Worker Talon Magazines for Short Darts for it, because I have a couple of them lying around anyway and they seem great for this kind of build. I’m also wondering if it would be possible to design a feeding mechanism, that will pull darts from two magazines alternatively and then mount them side by side on top, basically to double the capacity of the Blaster.
For the ESCs for the brushless motors I found some on eBay for like 8€ a piece, capable of providing 30A (which I think/hope will be enough) and running BLHeli. That is an interesting piece of firmware that was new to me. Basically you can program it quite a lot using a Arduino and it can actually run close loop speed control of which I’m always a fan of.