DIY Gyration Gun

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If you are familiar with the light guns of yesterday, they used flashes on the screen to tell the gun where it was pointing. Now we have the Wii's system which seems to have a sort of gyro (movement sensing) feature built in. It has always been a fantasy of mine to play those fun shoot 'em up arcade games on a big screen, like our projectors we love so much. So I figured its time since I only am young for so long, that I begin my project.

I wanted to use this specifically for the projector so I needed something that wasn't available commercially, since the LCD TopGun would not work with my screen size, at least it wouldn't accurately. So I figure that the only other way might be with a gyration remote that I heard of about a year ago. These are normally used for presentations and allow the user to move the cursor around on the screen with only a slight movement. Once I get MAME running with a game like AREA 51, I can use my remote as the crosshair.

I wanted it to obviously have a more real feeling so I figure I might as well put some form and looks into it as well. BB guns and older toy rifles have that look I wanted. Preferably an M16 feel is what I want, and I remember seeing those in toy stores a while back when they didn't have to color everything either orange or green. I am going to try and hardwire the remote so that a press of the gun trigger will trigger the mouse. Hopefully I will also be able to calibrate the gyration remote with the crosshair or laser pointer on the gun.

This will definitely be a hard task, and will require a bit of creative thinking here and there, but I think it is very possible. Let me konw if you have any other ideas at all. I will get some pictures up of the materials once I get them. Here are the two main pieces of equipment I was looking at:

Gyration Remote
Airsoft Gun

This sounds like a really cool idea! Completely possible as well, I remember some MAME games where you move your mouse and click to shoot. And if that Gyration remote can move around the cursor on screen I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work attached to that Air Soft Gun.

The Gyration remote might set you back a bit (~100 USD) , but if it does what it says it can, this would be really cool!

The way the gun and remote must work together might be pretty difficult to set-up. You might end up stripping the gyration remote down, and configuring it on that way.

Definately in the right forum topic though!

I have the gyration mouse you have pictured above. I use it for my PJ that I use in the classroom when I run google earth for my students, internet, and powerpoint. They are rare enough that there was a serious wow factor when I used it for the first time. They take a little getting use to, but then they are awesome. I paid about $80 for mine a year and a half ago at Fry's.

I've seen them for around $50 and I know Gyration has first generation recertified ones for $29 (Ultra) and $39 (Ultra GT). I would be spending hopefully no more than $50 on the first projector, so if it goes wrong, I didn't lose a lot. If it goes well, I may make another one with more expensive parts. I just want to know how hard it is going to be to mod both of these things so they work together.

Just lost a bid on a cheap gyration setup, but will try again.

Why won't the regular Nes/Xbox guns work? I though they only read the color that you pointed them at?

I recall you could cheat in Duck hunt using a printer and a screen shot of the ducks

Really? that's fricken awesome, i gotta go try that right now!

It should work. The light gun just looks for the white box around the duck when you pull the trigger (it goes away fast).

Why won't the NES gun work on a projector?

how is your GUN comeing along ?

Ok, two things.

One: The light-guns used on the NES and other old-era systems will NOT work with an LCD or a picture of a duck, or anything else. They only work with CRT monitors. The reason for this is that they are essentially light-sensors with a pushbutton attached. No camera, no color, just light. When they're pointed at the television, the game system is capable of timing things well enough to know more-or-less where the gun must be pointing if it's aimed at a TV by figuring out where the electron beam that lights up the phosphors at the front of the CRT must be pointing based on _when_ the the light reaching the sensor is brightest. Remember, CRTs not only display images in frames, what they actually do is display images in lines, from left to right, top to bottom. So, if you have a VERY fast clock, you can figure out what part of the screen a light sensor is pointed at based on when the light it sees is brightest.

LCD's, plasmas, etc are the reason that people are making fake light-guns.

Two: While an ebay'd gyration is probably cheapest, there is always the forthcoming Motion Plus from Nintendo, meant to attach to a Wiimote. This would probably make for a MUCH more complicated project, but is cheaper for a high-end gyro. (pros: more control of behavior of final product, smaller, possibly cheaper. cons: Serious hardware hacking, including microcontroller programming, interface design, and learning what things like I2C mean.)