This 3D Printed Sentry Rubber Band Gun Can Find Targets and Fire on Them Automatically

Here at 3DPrint.com, we’ve covered our fair share of 3D printed rubber band guns over the course of the past couple of years. It seems as though each and every rendition of these toy guns is a little bit more intricate and functional than the last. This certainly is the case with the 3D printed Rubber Band Sentry Gun, created by a 20-year-old student from Bienne, Switzerland, named Kevin Thomas.

For those of you who are unaware, a sentry gun is a firearm that can sense targets and then fire upon them. Thomas, however, elected to use this model to create a fully functional rubber band version of the gun. The model he created is capable of shooting 24 rubber bands in succession, although he tells us that it can easily be adapted with a larger barrel to fire up to 30.

Thomas has, for a long time, desired to create something of this magnitude, but it wasn’t until he saw a design on Thingiverse for an Automatic Rubber Band Blaster that the light bulb went off in his head.

“The ‘Automatic Rubber Band Blaster’ gave me the inspiration to design something similar but automated,” Thomas tells 3DPrint.com. “I used an Arduino Mega and for the motion the sentry uses two servo motors, one micro servo 180° for the tilt (y-axis) and a normal one for the pan (x-axis). For the fire I used a 360° servo-motor.”

Thomas used a software package created by Project Sentry Gun in order to control his creation. It allows the gun to easily find and shoot any moving target, all by itself.

The 3D printed gun was designed by Thomas using Cubify Invent, over a period of three days, and then the parts were 3D printed on his bq Witbox printer using PLA filament. The gun, if made correctly, has a shooting range of about 5 meters, and its design was inspired by a sentry turret seen in the Portal 2 video game.

Other than the 12 3D printed parts, which Thomas has made available on Thingiverse for anyone to download, the gun requires several nuts and screws, a threaded bar, a skateboard ball bearing, 30 cm of string, several pieces of metal pipe, and the various electronics mentioned above. All in all, this is quite the creation for a young man who has only owned a 3D printer for about 2 years.

What do you think about this automated gun? Discuss in the 3D Printed Rubber Band Sentry Gun forum thread on 3DPB.com. Check out the video below of the gun in action.