12/6/2018

I was dating this girl and going to meet her family for the first time. I knew she had a little brother that liked NERF guns. I figured if I could get the little brother to like me, then that would convince the whole family that I’m a nice boy.

I thought about if i was a little again and had a bunch of nerf guns, what would be fun and safe to do with them? i thought some type of competition or game that we can run up a score against each other or go for a high score together would be best.

The Features I wanted to be sure to incorporate are

  • Targets that mechanically hit a button when they are hit with a NERF dart
  • Glow in the Dark targets
  • Something that flashes or lights to indicate a successful target hit
  • A # display that can count up with each hit, or to keep score or “give points”
  • An inlay design to put numbers on the targets

The Overall Design ended up being 3 different sized circle targets. When the targets are hit with a dart, they would swing around and force a long stem to hit a button.

A tiny Arduino computer is wired to the buttons as well as an LED strip light and # display. The Arduino tells the LED when to flash, and keeps track of the score for the points display.

Since this toy was so big, some of the parts were too big to print as a single piece so i had to make them as multiple pieces.

LEFT: Some parts were split into multiple
RIGHT: I used a dove-tail puzzle piece design to join this part

Since i just bought some glow in the dark filament, I was eager to use it. I wanted to cut out an inlay on the “1”, “3”, and “5”, and put a glow in the dark number in there…..But the targets were too hard to print and work with, so I decided to just glue two flat surfaces together. I also found out the glow in the dark filament ruins the printer’s nozzle, but i still made renderings of what the glow in the dark targets would have looked like in the dark.

Early Concept
Final Construction Layout