As part of a multidisciplinary group of engineers from the University of Sheffield I entered the Thales student competition to produce a project in some way related to their business using a provided Arduino Uno and whatever else we could acquire.

We decided to implement a portable, ease to use, shooting range simulator for potential military and private sector use. The system was designed to be cheap, portable and to be constructed from readily available components. It utilised the Arduino to control the targets. Each target consisted of a card backing, red and green LEDs (to signify hostiles and civilians) and an infrared detector.

The Arduino talked over serial to a laptop running control software to display user scores and hit ratios. The part of the system attached to the weapon consisted of an infrared laser and a switch mounted behind the trigger. This system was designed so that it could be fitted to real, replica or any other standard weapon (in this case an AirSoft pistol). I wrote the C software for the Arduino and the Python desktop application, whilst the electronics and systems engineers put together the necessary hardware.