Idea for indoor training tool

[benzy2]

Three things sparked this thought process. First was that I had seen a video on television about a guy who had developed software that was a white board program using a standard computer, a Wii remote, a small IR LED board made from simple LEDs from Radio Shack, and some reflective tape. He then went on to make a cool touch and drag program that ran similar to an Ipod touch/Iphone. You could zoom in or out the same way you do with the Iphone screen using two fingers. You could also use the Wii remote as a mouse. The hardware was simple and the software, well that's all voodoo to me.

The second push was looking at Black Friday adds while browsing through a Cabela's add. It had a Wii game that was a hunting game that came with a wii controller in the shape of a toy rifle. I thought it looked somewhat cool, though rather toyish and nothing more than a little playing around.

The final spark was tonight when I came back from dinner board stiff wanting only to hit a range and shoot. That's when the idea to turn a standard rifle into a Wii remote. Pop a target up on the screen, calibrate the sensor bar to the screen to your rifle position, and you are in business. Developed correctly you would just point and shoot at a target and be good to go.

After a bit of research on how the Wii remote works it looks like the remote is doing two things. Transmitting and receiving. Most standard remote controls just transmit. They send the button input to the console and the console turns those signals into actions. The Wii remote does this but it also receives. While there is a gyro in the remote the front of the remote is a IR camera. For those familiar with the Wii system, the black bar that goes near the TV or the Wii console is a light bar. It has LEDs emitting IR light at the two edges. Based on these lights being in a fixed position relative to the picture on the screen, the system calculates where the remote is point in relation based on what the camera sees.

 

[benzy2]

So there are two ways to reach a working system and I'm not sure which is the best route. First would be to mount the camera pointing at a target on your monitor. Then using a program like a white board program you can calibrate the system to know where the edges of the displayed screen would be compared to what the camera is seeing.

From here it gets a little rough. I was thinking using an IR laser. We already have bore sighters that fit in the chamber so this would be fairly, though not directly, a modification to one of those. The idea is that you place a chamber IR laser into the rifle. You make the rear cap of the laser pressure activated. Cock the rifle and dry fire onto the IR pressure sensitive cap. Now you shoot a quick, though still sufficient for the camera, beam of IR light onto the target. This would take a little custom software from here as a beam of light is a beam and not a dot, where as most of the current whiteboard tech using an emitting LED which is much closer to a point.

This was visioned for use with benchrest mania. For those of you not familiar with the program it is freeware but in general it is a program where you aim at a target using a mouse, read the wind (user definable), and click to fire. All you need outside of this software is a way to point (the IR laser) and shoot (the IR laser that is activated by the firing pin striking the rear IR laser cap). You get trigger time using your actual trigger and you get to see where the shot actually went rather than just guessing based on how the shot looked through the sights.

The problem here is that we would need to develop a software that reads quick bursts of IR light as both mouse movement and a click as most software out now only shows the IR light as controlling mouse movement. Seems like a simple task though relative to the rest.

This is a system that would then work in basically any centerfire. You use chamber inserts just as the chamber laser bore sight uses making the unit fairly simple to drop into just about any centerfire rifle on the market today.

 

[benzy2]

The second option would be to follow the cabela's game/rifle controller design and use the rifle as the camera portion. Here you would have to mount the camera to the rifle and place IR LEDs at the screen. The camera wouldn't have to be mounted in the bore, as again we can calibrate the program to find the edges of the projected screen. This would probably mean mounting the camera underneath the barrel though the specifics could be worked out. You could make the camera magnetic and stick to the muzzle if you could package it small enough. For simplicity, I would mount the camera remotely (no pun intended) wired to the rest of the controller parts so that the muzzle would gain as little weight as possible while the rest of the controller parts could be mounted to a belt for standing or set on the floor or bench if in a prone or bench position. Another obstacle to consider is making a firing mechanism. The beauty of the first design is that the beam was transmitted onto a screen which the camera was looking at. Here the camera knows where it is pointing based on its position relative to the LEDs it was calibrated to. The problem comes in finding a way to run trigger out of this.

The first thought I have is to run a similar chamber plug that is basically a switch waiting to be activated by the firing pin. If you are mounting the camera on the muzzle you could run a wire down the bore from the chamber firing pin switch, out through the camera, and then down with the rest of the wires to the remote controller components.
The second idea is to mount a switch behind the trigger that is user adjusted to the point activate at the point the trigger breaks. This would allow rimfire rifles to play as well since you wouldn’t be required to place anything in the small chamber, though I wouldn’t doubt a small enough switch could be fitted into a .22lr chamber.
Either of these two options, though not as compact as just dropping in an IR laser in the barrel, is one that is turning a rifle into a custom Wii remote and would then use the same basic programming as turning a standard Wii remote into a mouse. I think in the long run this system will be easier to keep going as most future Wii remote developments I can foresee would be made using the remote as the mouse rather than using the remote as a fixed camera and the LEDs as a mouse. I personally am guessing the future will see software smooth enough to allow a Wii remote to work well with standard first person shooters. If this happens, having the controller fit to the rifle, rather than the LEDs fit to the rifle and the controller static, would be very beneficial and remove a lot of the software headaches.

So if you are still with me any thoughts?

I have a couple weeks of free time yet this winter that I plan to test a bit of this with current software. If I really think there is potential here to have an indoor practice setup. It wouldn’t simulate recoil and it wouldn’t work on semi auto systems but for now it is focused on using a bolt action rifle. So hopefully before the New Year I will have a prototype together and pictures/videos to follow.

 

[benzy2]

After reading a bit more things look to have become a bit less complicated. Some people have modified the Wii controller to remove the filter that blocks everything not IR. With this removal a laser pointer works on screen as the mouse feature. The other good news is I have looked at some of the chamber mounted laser bore sighters. These use a button on the rear of the sighter that is depressed when the chamber closes. It looks like all that would be needed to get this to work is to shave the button flat with the rest of the device so that when the bolt closes the sight is off, yet when the firing pin is struck it lights up. For a $40 investment of a bore sighter I may have to order one or two here soon.