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[shadesfox]

Been working at making my laser guided nerf bomb. The problem seems to mostly be cash. What is needed is a processor that can do the fourier analysis needed to pick out the laser in the image. Such things are widely available. However, most cheap boards that can do such a thing tends to be $150 ARM boards (The same sort of processor that powers

Comments

[janusd]

....

You're actually trying to do it?

We're ALL DOOMED D:

[shadesfox]

What? You thought I wouldn't? I'm a fox on the edge man!

[zimzat]

Have you considered Arduino?

[shadesfox]

It looks interesting. It may be useful in the remote processing scenario, it doesn't look like it has floating point units. Though anything to push down the cost of the rocket is helpful.

[zimzat]

There were a couple of Arduino sessions at Dragon*Con this year. The total cost for the base (processor memory, etc) was only about 30$ for the most common module, and they have shields to handle various extra functionality (wireless shields, rfid readers, etc) for only about 20 to 30$ each as well. Add in a couple of servos and you could get up to a one-use launcher (with secondary computer for hard number cruncher) for less than 75$ or so, all reusable parts. (Hmm, I forgot to calculate the cost of a decent camera in that)

I think it would be very neat to see a launcher which aimed at a laser pointer, all while taking into account trajectory, drift, distance, etc. I look forward to hearing more on this project. :-)

[shadesfox]

I know a guy who says he can get a camera on the cheap. If I can get away with cutting out most hard number crunching through cute tricks I could probably get away with the base unit, the $30 servo shield and a pair of servos plus camera as far as electronics go.

[reese_tora]

So, assuming you have a laptop to run the base station already, it would cost roughly the same either way?

I'd be a little cautious about putting a $150+ chip in a projectile, even if I was confident of shock proofing it for normal use.

Good luck. :3

[shadesfox]

Yea. The real concern is to reduce the size and weight of the rocket and parts. Getting costs down would be helpful, but secondary.

[derakon]

An RC nerf bomber would be pretty cool, especially if you could fit a camera into the bombs...

[shadesfox]

Camera guided bombs, that could be fun too. My main concern would be making the image stable enough to actually see something.

[shadesfox]

Rc plane parts don't track lasers.

[thalass]

You could use something similar to the wiimote camera system. The cam only sees the one frequency of light (a narrow band of IR, in this case) through an optical filter, and i think the camera itself. It produces a high contrast image that would be easier to process than a colour image. That may be an option for the remote-processing system, since a wiimote connects through bluetooth, but it might be a bit pricey to put in a projectile! Though you may be able to buy the camera module separately, and hook it up to an arduino (I think there's a tiny usb version). Actually i vaguely remember something about the wiimote camera module output being x-y coordinates or something like that, so there wouldn't be much processing required. Just produce the servo commands to keep the dot in the centre.

[shadesfox]

Yea, removing as much processing as possible would be huge. If nothing else I could just make this thing like the first generation IR missiles (they cut the screen into 4 quadrants, then angled to the hottest one).