ouch3994
I wanted to challenge the long range shooting communities to the idea of making their own smart devices to help advance the hobby. I had brainstormed for a while hoping to build up a thermal scope that would be much more affordable than the standard consumer scopes and seemed to take a distracted turn towards making a full smart rifle scope platform. The future expandability can easily support a thermal camera in the future, and as I take a small break from this project I wanted to share with the hacker communities what I had accomplished so far!
Some stats of the performance for ya: using a Raspberry Pi 4 I have achieved a standard frame rate of 36 fps for the output feed to the TFT display, with the ballistics solutions updated around 16 FPS behind the scenes on a separate thread. For the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, about 24 fps and 14 fps for the ballistics (NOT BAD!!). I feel this can easily be sped up in the future with a full sweep rewrite in C (since this is running in Python at the moment) or by using a different frame editing library for speed ups.
This build uses a 9 DOF IMU unit to feed tilt angles, gyro rates and magnetometer heading to the main ballistics algorithm for accurate results. Usually a handheld ballistics computer can run about $650.00 so being able to do this for under $200 with a video feed already is hilariously exciting. Alot of my motivation for projects comes from showing that consumer products are over priced.... I decided to use two rotary encoders for inputs to simulate the Elevation and Windage adjustment turrets of a real rifle scope. They work nice and even click with inputs. Additional buttons were added for more functionality, I am considering even more buttons for the forward shooting hand position for fast input.
Let me know what you think, and if I should continue to the next stage with this, a compact and shockproof housing design!
Thanks,
Jack
Ray Patel
Innotech423
patrickpoirier51
Rishi Bhatnagar
This is awesome! You cover almost every variable, except one- I shoot F-class .308W, and the biggest issue at that range (1000 yards), is wind. If you can figure out a way to measure (estimate) wind speed at a distance, it would be a game changer in long range shooting!!
There may be a doppler interferometric way to do it, but that could get complicated with pulsed lasers and avalanche photo-diodes. But there are ready made time-of-flight distance sensing modules like the VL53L1X that could (if the beam is sent through the scope), be used at a great distance if a beam-splitter and another photo-diode were used as reference- look up "laser microphone" . Extracting wind speed from that data is the hard part though.