The Chronograph - Part 5

When developing the Ballistic Chronograph, I decided that I needed a way to have, effectively, a command-prompt. I also wanted to have a way to display text in an auto-scrolling view. It would be used similar to Object Pascal' Writeln, C's printf or C#'s Console.WriteLine. The Arduino libraries already have an abstract class for writing text, Print. If you've done any Arduino programming, you've already used this class indirectly via the HardwareSerial class.

The Chronograph - Part 4

The touch panel and touch keyboard were an interesting challenge. I picked this one up mainly because the price was well into the "impulse buy" range. I didn't really have a plan for it, but figured it would be interesting to play with. After a little bit of Google-fu, I found that the 4-wire resistive touch panels were rather common, and best of all, there is an Arduino library for it.  I also picked up the display because HSC claimed to have data on it. It turned out that used the relatively common T6963C interface. There is an Arduino library for that as well.

The Chronograph - Part 3

Now I'm going to turn my attention to the software for the stand-alone controller shown in the previous post.

Before I ever started working on the UI for the device, the first order of business was to get the code needed to actually perform it's primary function written.

The Chronograph - Part 2

In the last post I showed the electronics behind the ballistic chronograph sensor array, or using chronograph terminology, the "screens". The frame for the screens was built from 1"x.5" extruded aluminum U-channel, .5"x.5" aluminum angle, and 3/16" steel rods for the uprights. Various bits of hardware and some .25"x1" steel spacers from my parts bin, drilled out on one end to 3/16" and tapped to 6-32 on the other. The cross pieces at the top which house the sensors are actually plastic U-Channel surface wiring conduit snap covers.

Now I'll cover initial stand-alone controller I built. This part of the project evolved as I was building it. It started with a trip to the (sort of) local surplus electronics store, HSC Electronic Supply.

The Chronograph - Part 1

As mentioned in this post and teased in this one, one of the things I was going to write about was the construction of a ballistic chronograph. The intent of this post is to outline it's construction and my approach to building it. It's intended use and all the information surround that is beyond the scope of this post.

Teaser

Just a little teaser. Here's a video of a presentation I did with David I demonstrating the Ballistic Chronograph I built a couple of years ago. This is actually revision 2. The same screens were used with a new custom controller that linked via Bluetooth to a Delphi Android application.

As you can see from the video, Nerf guns aren't particularly powerful.