Paintball Gun Printer

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Status: Postponed due to Bob Plonker not having sufficient time.

Project Inception: Sunday 27th May 2007

Status: Feasability Study

Project Leader: Bob Plonker

Project Members: Glen

1 What the hell is a Paintball Gun Printer?
2 What is the 'target print surface going to be?
3 Basic Design
4 Design considerations not being considered
5 What's Next
6 Progress

What the hell is a Paintball Gun Printer?

This project was born from a desire to have a very visual project for Chaos Computer Camp in August. Paintball markers are great fun and I have a few of them as well as a Lego Mindstorms Invention System 2.0. So it came to me, why not build a dot-matrix style printer using a paintball marker as its ink dispenser.

What is the 'target print surface going to be?

CCC is taking place at an old airfield this year, we plan to mount the turrent on top of Glen's camper van and print on the runway below us.

Basic Design

Build a simple turret to hold the paintball marker and control it using a Lego Minstorms brick. The position feedback will be provided building two optical encoders using the Lego IR sensors, a 32 increment wheel and an estimated gear reduction of 1:15. Which would provide a theoretical accurancy of 0.75 degrees. The trigger will be opperated by an electric motor powered cam providing a high rate of fire if necessary.

The code will be written in NQC (Not Quite C) a sub-set of the C language. I plan to write subroutines to print every keyboard character. With only 6 weeks remaining there will be no neat user interface. The message to be printed will be loaded into the brick as a variable from the Open Source IDE via its IR link downloaded from a laptop. Failing that, the message will be manually rewritten in the code as a constant.