Homemade IoT Remote Turret Gun
To give a bit of an introduction into this project, I’ve always been interested in robotics and automation kinda stuff, having grown up on movies like Terminator, Short Circuit and others, so when the opportunity to build an actual firing remote turret came along, I jumped on it!
The hardware side of things were going to be short term bits to get me up and running from a developer point of view, as the final project would be adapted to a much bigger turret gun when completed. So I started to scavenge around for the basic materials I would use to build it.
I built the prototype from lots of random junk and added some stepper motors and drivers that would be used to move the gun. Additionally, there was a servo motor added to pull the trigger of the gun, though in the final product, the trigger is electronic, so we can actually fire that with an output from the GPIO pins on the development board.
The below video shows how the turret works and provides a brief outline of the materials used to build it.
Hardware:
- – Raspberry Pi 3
- – EazyDriver stepper motor drivers
- – 2 x NEMA 17 stepper motors
- – 1 x Roll of drive belt matching the stepper motors
The Raspberry Pi is running a Python script to read commands coming from AWS and when it receives new data, it parses this and feed the information to the desired control methods.
Control messages are sent to AWS using an android application that contains a virtual joystick. When the position coordinates for the stick are changed, the data is packaged up in a JSON object and sent to AWS.
I’ll post some code from the project soon!
Rich,
