My airsoft gun turrets

It’s a bit stange but there are so much project I’m doing that I can’t get the time to post them online. I already wanted to post this for quite a long time so there it is…

A couple of months ago, in the summer I made a prototype with my cnc machine of a, sort of, centry gun turret. I milled them from a piece of plywood 4mm which is prefect for making little simplistic things like a turret. Since I already got this hand loaded airsoft toy gun I first made some drawings and milled them. The pan-tilt unit looks a bit the same as the robotic arm I made earlier, I used the drawings of the rotation platform and modified them so there could be a toy gun mounted on them. Here below is a picture of the toy gun and the shooting box thingy.

Here are the pictures of what I made for mounting the gun on the platform, the gun is clamped between the wooden parts. As you can see there is a big gear on the side, this gear makes the vertical movement. I got this and another gear from a toy rocket launcher which I demolished another time. It’s always good to keep parts from things you trow away, especially gears which belong together. Always handy.

Here’s how I connected the gun to the mounting plates. I used a bearing which is pressed into the wood so it would fit nicely and for mounting the gun in the bearing i used a countersunk screw. Below is the result of how its all put together.

Here is a little movie of the structure:

So I first wanted to make it load itself with a servo or something and make it shoot with a servo but this all didn’t work out because it was a bit too difficult comparing to a electric airsoft toy gun which is so much easier to use for this kind of things…

Then, a few months later I came with the idea of making another airsoft gun turret, but this time with fairly cheap electric gun from dealextreme. Since this gun was much bigger I needed to make another pan tilt unit. I’m not able to make such big parts at my cnc machine at home so I machined them on a cnc at my school. The pan tilt unit is just 2 times bigger so nothing fancy on the design.

As you can see the design is kind of the same, but I added some extras:

A LASER sight! 🙂

Since this turret worked quite well I made a little PCB for it for controlling the toy gun, make it shoot with a relay. The PCB controls the trigger for shooting, there is a little Attiny13 which reads in the servo pulse and decides to power the relais (or not). I controlled the gun with a servo remote control, but the plan was to make a real centry airsoft turret with a camera and computer software. Since  the servos I used weren’t strong enough I was not able to make it rotate that well and it was not precise enough, so maybe I’ll put some stronger ones in when I feel like it. As you can see on the pictures below…. (o, I love to just post pictures to show you in stead of writing ;))

A bit of an important fact is that there is a noise filter around the servo cable. There was a lot of noise which made the signal crappy to read in so I added this filter from a USB cable and wrapped the cable trough it 2 times.

Of course you want to see a movie of the gun itself, shooting 😉 I added a wireless mini camera on it and had some fun driving it all wireless from another room 😉

Just some shooting:

So that was my adventure on making these airsoft gun turrets, I really enjoyed making them, I just like to make things! If you want to know something, ask me.

Here are there drawings of the two turrets

I hope you liked it too.