Project Name: Paintball Explosions

Group Members: Olivia Desormeaux, Catherine Pike, Lucas Ward

Goals: To capture a high-speed image of a paintball splatter and the exit of the paintball from the barrel of the gun

Camera: Nikon 990

List of Items Used:

Duct tape

Masking tape

Paintball gun - Tippman 98 Custom

Several cardboard boxes

Scissors

Paintballs

Flash

Camera (see above)

Plexiglas

Paper towels (to clean)

Wooden blocks and a plastic box (gun support)

Equipment Setup: Click on the picture for a full description.

Methods:

        To get the image of the paintball leaving the gun, we used a photogate at the tip of the barrel that triggered the flash as the paintball exited the gun. We placed the camera perpendicular to the tip of the barrel to get the best possible shot as the paintball exited. We used a time delay to capture the paintball at different points after leaving the barrel. To get the image of the paintball splattering against a surface, we increased the time delay on the flash instead of moving the photogate due to error in the path of the paintball. Because of the splatter caused by the paintball, we constructed a "house" out of cardboard boxes to contain the splatter. On one side of the "house", we cut out a hole for a Plexiglas "window" to capture the paintball splatter. Originally, our camera was positioned horizontally but this left too much empty space on the left side of the picture so we turned the camera vertically. This allowed us to capture more of the splatter in the picture.

    Triggers:

        To trigger the flash unit (which we put on the paperclip setting and put a magnifier on), first we started with a sound delay.  We tried to work with that for a while on Wednesday before figuring out that the sound emitted from the barrel when the paintball gun was shot wasn't reliable enough to always trigger the flash at the same moment.  We decided to use a photogate instead.  First we built one out of cardboard, two laser photo sensors and some duct tape.  This was was shaped like a C and very unstable.  It ended up bending and messing up the delay that we had set, so we had to build a new photogate.  The second photogate was a lot more stable and made out of cardboard folded into a triangular prism shape.  It held the photogate sensors very steady and worked for a while, until we had trouble attaching it to the gun mount.  Finally, Thursday afternoon, we made a third photogate, attaching the photo sensors to a metal stand, which was both sturdy and free-standing.  This solved the problems of the flash trigger.  The paintballs were shot through the photogate, and almost every time the flash went off according to the delay we set.

Diagram of Setup:

© Copyright 2008 Olivia Desormeaux, Catherine Pike and Lucas Ward. The use of any pictures on this site without permission is illegal. Contact winters@ncssm.edu regarding use of any photographs.