(Now on Hack a Day - I'm chuffed!  )

With the explosion of the hobbyist microcontroller scene the past few years, PCB fab houses have sprung up left right and centre. At these wonderous places, you can get professional quality PCBs fabricated for your every desires for reasonable costs. They can range from very low cost and looooong lead times, to acceptable prices (~$50-$100) for low volume runs ('protoype' services). At the larger end of the scale, you can panelise your design and get even better value per PCB...

Whilst these services are great - and put pro-quality PCBs in the everymans hands - they have besides the cost and lead times one other annoying problem - how do you know your design even works ? Nothing more infuriating than getting 5 professionally silk screened coffee coasters back after waiting 3 weeks.

Given the above, and because I'm notoriously impatient and hate waste - I often fab my own boards still. Using this method I can draw up a design in Eagle and from there have an etched PCB waiting for components in just 30 minutes. Fantastic for Friday Night Hacking! Using this method you can, with a bit of practice, get down to 8mil quite easily and some have even managed smaller.

The ammo counter, the most ubiquitous and humble of FPS game elements, but completely absent from Nerf combat (apart from some transparent magazines). I decided to remedy this!

I've taken a Nerf Stampede (electric, fully automatic, clip-fed) and added an IR light gate to detect shots, broken out one of the clip insertion interlock switches to detect reloading, and added a display for the count, with an Arduino to act as the brains.

 I haven't written this up properly either on axio.ms or here, but there are some pictures of it (finally..............) in action:  http://axio.ms/projects/iiyamameetxilinx/

The ASync-Firefly is an Analog Synchronising Firefly very heavily inspired by the Synchronising Firefly kit from Alex at Tinkerlog. I was inspired to see what it would take to replace the ATiny13 with common, off the shelf analog parts. My goals were to have no digital parts (which I failed at), using only through hole parts I could get from my local Jaycar (successful) and being able to use a single battery to run a string of kits (successful).

For those unfamiliar with Alex's kit; the basic premiss is that when you set up a few kits within range of each other they start of blinking randomly. As each kit detects flashes from their neighbours they adjust their phase slightly to try and synchronise themselves. It's a very nice example of self organising systems.

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