After fighting the rabbits all summer we needed to up the stakes.  The first version brought out many flaws.  First we could not turn the water pressure up all the way as it stretched some of the water lines and slowed and limited the range of the water gun.  Also it only went back and forth, and at night the IR was not very strong.  Sooooo…

This year we also switched out a great deal of the electronics and software.  Last year a Phidgets single servo controller was used, this year I switch to a Polou 8 servo serial controller.  I also added a pan and tilt setup so that the gun could go up and down besides going from left to right.  The copper tubing was switched with a plastic ice maker hose,  and just to add to the fun two in ground pop up sprinklers were added.

The pan and tilt setup came from ServoCity in fact the servos and any parts for the servos came from here.

Again this year I used Andrew’s AForge libraries for the motion detection, he has moved to a new site it can be found here.   I was able to modify his code and add in different functionality that I wanted. It also has some great examples and the forums are great for answers.

One piece of code that made life very easy was written by Colin Karpfinger, his examples made the jump to the Polou servo controller a nice easy one.  He can be found here.

For most of the parts(servo controller, wire, etc) I got them from Trossen Robotics they can be found here.  Not only can you get the parts here, but you can get some great help from the community in their forums.

How did it all fair? That will be in the next post.  There were some success and some failures.  At that time I will go more in the the code and some of the videos of it in action…