Over the weekend I played paintball with some friends. My marker (paintball gun), is completely mechanical from the trigger to the paintball feeder. However, at this field I was up against opponents that practically had cybernetic weapons from the future. They had electronic feeders that agitate the paintballs inside the hopper, where the paintballs sit, so they feed faster. Many had electronic triggers giving them the ability to shoot as fast as they can, or in some cases, switch to full auto. One person's marker has a emitter detector diode pair, written as "eye" on the side, that detects when a paintball is in the proper place in the gun before allowing the user to fire.
Another person had a marker that cost $1800 dollars. It was in a padded foam case before the player gingerly took out and meticulously assembling the beast. I had to ask him about it. He told me he had just updated the firmware on the gun before coming to the field. Yes, firmware. The marker has a small b/w LCD, about 120 x 30 pixels, that showed all sorts of information about the gun; the gas efficiency of each shot, number of shots fired, and various other statistics. Most other electronic paintball markers use 9v batteries, but this one used a small lithium ion pack. The user told me that he gets about 3000 shots from a single charge, and that he can fire about 30 rounds per second. That's 100 seconds of constant firing of a virtual paint laser out of his gun.
The technology I was up against was impressive. And collectively, they came in at about $15,000.
Long story short, my friends and I mopped the floor with them all. With all of their technology, they were no match for our aggressive tactics.
Later the teams were split up, and it was more fair. I was able to see those expensive markers in action. They are impressive. Now I want something like what they have, but I want to build it better. I foresee a microcontroller project in the near future.
Do you play? Has you ever built anything for your paintball markers before? What would a good paintball marker first project?
If anyone want to know, I was using a completely stock Spyder MR4 with CO2, and later, Compressed Air.
Cabe