NERF Minigun Turret for the 3D Printed RC Tank

In this tutorial I will show you how I build this double-barrel nerf minigun turret for the 3D printed tank that I build in one of my previous videos. Spoiler alert, the minigun or the gatling gun is actually fake, but it makes this tank looks super cool and fun to play with.

You can watch the following video or read the written tutorial below.

Overview

The turret has a magazine that can hold around 200 nerf darts and it can fire all of them in around a minute. That’s a firing rate of around 200 darts per minute. The darts can fly at a speed of around 50m/s. That provides a distance range of around 12 meters.

These are the maximum stats, which aren’t something crazy, but we can control them independently, both the firing power and the firing rate, through the RC transmitter.

For controlling the tank I’m using a cheap commercial RC Transmitter which sends commands to it. At the tank, there is a suitable RC receiver which receives the commands and sends them to a microcontroller.

The brain of this platform is an Atmega2560 microcontroller-based board and for easily connecting everything together I made a custom PCB which can be simply attached on top of the board.

So, as I already mentioned, we don’t have a real minigun or gutling gun mechanism that fires the nerf darts, but a simple and common method of firing nerf darts with the help of flywheels. The flywheels spin at a very high RPM and in opposite direction, so when the soft part of the nerf dart comes in contact with them; they propel the dart quite vigorously.

To get the nerf darts to that propelling position, we have a rotating part that simply pushes the darts in place as it rotates. 

And as for storing the nerf darts, I used yet another simple method. I made a big magazine that holds the nerf darts, and with the help of gravity and the two rollers at the bottom of the magazine, the nerf darts are brought in place for the pusher to push them to the flywheels. 

3D Model and STL Download Files

You can view the 3D model of this NERF Minigun Turret RC tank directly on your web-browser with Onshape.

You can get the 3D model of this RC tank/ robot platform , as well as the STL files for 3D Printing from Cults3D.

Electronics – NERF Minigun Turret and RC Tank Circuit Diagram

Let’s take a look at the electronics for the NERF Minigun Turret and the RC tank and explain how it works. The brain is an ATmega2560 microcontroller-based board or an Arduino MEGA board.

Bill of Materials

You can get the components from the links below:

Disclosure: These are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

As for the BOM for the RC tank, please check the RC Tank article.

Please note this article is still under construction…. please check tomorrow to get the complete BOM for the turret as well.