Home-built shooting game with Nerf targets and a Raspberry Pi
Ready, Aim, Fire
© Lead Image © Tithi Luadthong, 123rf.com
A cool Nerf gun game for a neighborhood party provides a lesson in Python coding with multiple processors.
Last Halloween, I was asked to put together a Nerf game for a local neighborhood party. Not wanting to do just the same old thing, I got together with a couple of local makers, and we built a set of electronic targets to create a real-life tower defense game! Although COVID put a damper on this year's plans, we still managed to get most of the hardware together to expand the experience for a second round.
The original game had three targets: an Arduino Uno [1] brain, an audio amplifier, and a loudspeaker. Each target was placed inside a wooden structure that we called a "tower" (Figure 1). The object of the game was to shoot at the targets with a gun firing Nerf darts. A confetti canon was also built into the tower to announce when the tower "fell," which means that the target on the tower had sustained a predefined number of hits from the Nerf gun. We built two identical tower sets, one for each end of the field. Each system operated independently. The game monitors were responsible for powering down the system when the other team won.
Figure 1: The original Nerf targets: The blue disks are worth one point; the red disk in the center tower is worth three points.
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