Development of a cost-effective shooting simulator using laser pointer

In this paper, the development of a cost-effective shooting simulator is presented. The proposed system employs the photodiode sensors for detecting the laser pointer. To reduce the cost, the photodiode sensors are arranged into rows and columns, and the scanning technique is adopted to detect the presence of the laser beam on the sensor arrays. A cheap microcontroller system AT89S52 is used to perform the task. The experiment results show that the developed shooting simulator achieves a high reliability in the laser pointer detection, especially for indoor application. Additionally, the developed application software running on a PC is very useful and effective tool to monitor the shooting process, and the shooting reports could be generated for analysing the shooter´s performance.