Designing the Paintball Safety System

This design has the main goal of ensuring that the paintballs are travelling under 300 feet per second which is a safe speed.

The paintball system consists of a microcontroller with a 3-digit 7-segment display driver and a sensor circuitry. By measuring the amount of IR energy striking the sensor that causes a voltage swing detectable by the microcontroller, the presence or absence of a ball can be detected. To indicate safe shooting, a timer is set to overload when the limit is exceeded by the number of instruction cycles. Those calibrated paintball chronographs used at tournaments and paintball fields are intended to be replaced by this safety system.

The sensor circuitry and the microcontroller code are two major subsystems that divide this safety system. To trigger the microcontroller into action, the sensor circuitry uses the concept of “beam break”. The phototransistors are being saturated with IR energy since the IR diodes are constantly ON wherein about 0.1V is the voltage present in the microcontroller at this state. The amount of IR energy striking the sensor will drop when a paintball crosses in front of the IR diode, as the microcontroller detects 4.2V.