making a touch screen trigger

[joelT33]

Hey guys,

My friend and I have come up with an idea of using a touch screen to act as a trigger for a paintball gun. This would enable a very fast and relible trigger. We haven't worked with touch screens a great deal and we we wondering if anybody has prior experience with them and if so how hard would they be to make or how hard would it be to find some one to make small ones that could be used for this purpose. Thanks so much for your comments.

 

[PottedMeat]

it sounds like you just want a touch switch to trigger a paintball gun?

i.e. touch a spot on the gun, and it fires?

switches like these have been in use for a while and are change in capacitance based, ive seen some in elevator buttons

if the trigger is already electronic, then you may be able to just use a off the shelf nearly totally self contained chip with all the necessary hardware as the switch like ICs from QPROX http://www.qprox.com/
all you would need to do is build a small circuit and make the sensor (basically a loop of wire and ground plane i think)

but if the trigger is mechanical, maybe you could use a solenoid but that may kill response time


note - i have no idea how a paintball gun fires ( is it electronic like with a solenoid or something or a does the trigger physically move something out of the way?)

 

[jagec]

hair trigger > touch trigger...it's a pain to concentrate on holding your finger away from the trigger lest you accidentally shoot something.

 

[DrPizza]

Personally, I've always thought if you were going to work on a gun's design to improve it, accuracy would be far more important. I'd rather send 4 or 5 well aimed balls than 100 zinging every which way in the targets direction. As far a touch screen goes, why a "touch screen"... why not just something that operates on touch only?

example: something like the touch lamps that turn on when you touch them (works on the bodies capacitance). Sounds too sensitive to me though.

 

[joelT33]

btt