Shoot First with Home-Built Star Wars Target Practice

If you’ve never been to a carnival and shot targets to win a stuffed animal, you’re missing out. The shooting gallery is a classic game has been around forever and for a good reason: It’s fun!

Koldo Santisteban wanted to create this same carnival-style target game with a modern twist in order to show people fun ways to use Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and programming.

There are a total of 5 targets right now — all Star Wars bad guys — though you can scale this up as you please. Each target has an Arduino Uno connected that manages its servo and IR receiver. When a target detects a “hit” it sends a signal to an Arduino Mega, which is connected to all of them. The mega is serving as a master for all the i2c communication with a raspberry pi, which is making the noises and keeping track of score and time.

The blaster has an Arduino uno inside of it as well. Also packed inside are an infrared sensor, some LEDs and a tiny vibration motor so you can feel the blasts.

Admittedly the current set up looks pretty bare, but all the important bits are done! All that is left is to make it pretty!