Nerf Hacking Notes

My kids asked me, yet again, to fix busted Nerf darts. There’s a few sitting here beside me waiting for cyanoacrylate as I type this in fact. One or two have a plastic tip that is starting to separate, another has double splits down it’s shaft. This would be less of a big deal if we had more, but looking at the stores just walking around and Nerf replacements aren’t cheap!

This led me online and down the rabbit hole of DIY foam ammo, gun mods (dart post / air restrictor removals) and inevitably looking at DIY guns (which are very similar to the water guns). I collected the kid’s 3 Nerf guns, and started researching their hackability, to see if I could get the owner’s permission to upgrade their gun.

[Pictures coming soon, will edit the post and add them when I post them]
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Entertainment Center

EntCent - Front

Finally got around to mounting the monitor on the VESA-mount arm I’ve had kicking around for ages.
Moved the Raspberry Pi to behind the wooden support, wired everything up and hid most of the wires behind the support.

EntCent - Back

The Pi is currently running OMSC, but basically only for the weather plugin right now. I have used it for watching videos, but the internal setup isn’t fixed yet and the games we play on the Homebrew-modded Wii.

Planned/Wanted updates include:

  • I would like to add a USB MPEG Encoder, HD/LD capable to encode things like VCR movies, stream Wii video games, but also accommodate upgrades and adding HD to the mix.
  • I want to create some power-adapter bits-and-pieces, so I can use a regular computer power supply to power the various USB/5V and 12V devices with a single device. Molex-USB female adapters anyone? 😉
  • I need a shorter HDMI-DVI24+1 cable.

DIY Water Gun- V1

As promised in my DIY/Homemade Water Guns post, here are some pictures of the various stages of our build process following this Instructable: Easy-Peasy PVC Water Gun [All Steps].

We started with a collection of parts, and the kids and I cut the 10′ pvc pipes into 6 pieces. Each gun used:

  • PVC: 1 1/4″, 20″ pipe
  • PVC: 1 1/4″ End Cap
  • PVC: 1″, 20″ pipe
  • PVC: 1″ T
  • PVC: 3/4″ (IIRC) Threaded Cap
  • Rubber O-rings x2
  • Teflon Thread Tape
  • PVC primer and glue

DIY Water Gun V1- Collected Parts
DIY Water Gun V1- Collected Parts

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DIY/Homemade Water Guns – Collected Thoughts

The heat of this summer (2015, Vancouver, BC Area), along with something that happened to my youngest child, prompted me to look into how to DIY a good water gun.

My youngest was at an end-of-the-school year party at a local park. The kids were told it was OK to bring water guns, yay! So we went out and bought a couple of cheap water guns. Long story short, my kid had fun, but was severely outgunned…

So I thought maybe I’d see if the internet had a solution to that. 😉
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