nowfound

Work · March 20, 2022

I’m Building a Nerf Dart Missile Defense System [video]

I’m building a robot that can track nerf darts and shoot them out of the air. I’ve worked on other projects in robotics and object tracking (perception for self driving cars), but this has a whole different set of challenges. Nerf rival rounds travel at over 100 feet per second and shooting them out of the air requires aiming systems that are precise to less than half the width of a human hair and timing precision of 600 times faster than the blink of an eye. This is the first part of the series of me building the project (and my first video!) so I’d love to hear what you think!

In plain words

This video documents the development of a robotic system designed to detect and intercept Nerf darts in flight. The creator, who has experience in robotics and object tracking from self-driving car perception work, faces unique engineering challenges: Nerf rounds travel at over 100 feet per second, requiring aiming precision to sub-micron tolerances and timing accuracy 600 times faster than human eye blink speed. The project is presented as the first installment in a series exploring the technical solutions needed to achieve this feat.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Most people use Claude inside a browser, then waste time copying prompts, files, and fixes back and forth. This video breaks down 7 Claude Code commands that turn your terminal into a cleaner AI workspace. Learn how to use /ultrathink for hard problems, /clear to reduce context bloat, /loop for local recurring tasks, /schedule for cloud work, and /insights to audit your usage. Build a Claude workflow that saves time, cuts token waste, and runs while you sleep.

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • IB
    I built an autopilot for the lunar lander game2023 · szhu.github.io · ▲277

    I got pretty good at (and very addicted to) the lunar lander game from a few days ago... so I decided to make an autopilot for the lander based on what I felt like was the best strategy! Now I can have perfect landings every time without lifting a finger :D Writing the autopilot code was a lot more fun than I expected! It felt a bit like programming a robot. Source code: https://github.com/szhu/lunar-lander-autopilot Original lander HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35032506

  • ATOM6 Projectiles2017 · ▲93

    Repel drones & Nerf Nerds with paintball guns

  • Nerf N-Strike Modulus2015 · ▲135

    1000+ combinations of Nerf awesomeness

  • DriftMar 2026 · godrift.ai · ▲243

    AI agent to run robot simulations faster and reliably

  • DC
    Detecting collision between 500k circles below 5ms2023 · github.com · ▲59

    Heya. I created a flexible collision engine for broad detection in C that's also pretty fast. Personally that's my best, so I wanted to show it here. Although... still not as fast as DragonEnergy's one that supposedly handled millions of agents bouncing off each other every frame on an old i3, haha. I hope I get better at this! He set the bar pretty high for me. I was considering including some small function that tries finding the nearest entity, although I think it might be better to simply use query for that matter. Perhaps in the future I will get a good idea of how to do that more…

  • AntigravityDec 2025 · ▲145

    The world's first 8K 360° drone

More work this month

the category →
  • Let agents source clips from terabytes of your local video

    Work · 19d ago · clipto.com

  • Hey we are Computable. We spent years building trading infrastructure at Jump Trading and Coinbase. From that point of view, compute looks like energy markets before 2000: everything trades through private bilateral leases, there’s no visible price, and nothing can be resold. The same H100 rents at a 2x spread depending on who’s asking, and once you sign a 24-month lease, it can never change hands. So we built a market for GPU nodes, sold by the calendar week. Here are three things you can do on it that you can’t do anywhere else: - Buy exactly the weeks you need. Three nodes for the last…

    Work · 11d ago · getcomputable.com

  • Free local transcription that is 100% Private

    Work · 18d ago · hynote.ai

  • The app store for voice native apps that lives in your notch

    Work · 29d ago · voiceos.com

  • Ask any question, get a video back instantly

    Work · 25d ago · scrimba.com

Launched alongside, March 2022

the whole month →
  • IM

    Hi HN! I made many small web games in the past with Unity or Phaser. But this time I wanted to make something completely on my own. So I coded a basic game framework in plain JavaScript, and used it to make Almost Pong. This was a really fun project that taught me a lot about JavaScript, and I plan to make more minimalist games with this framework. Interesting fact: Almost Pong doesn't load any assets, all sprites and sounds are generated with code. Happy to answer questions, and please let me know if you have any feedback on the game. Thanks!

    Dev tools · 2022 · lessmilk.com

  • IM

    Life & fun · 2022 · networksfromscratch.com

  • HA

    Paste the following into the console of any HN page - for annotated avatars on all HN comments. (self contained code) for(u of document.querySelectorAll('.hnuser'))for(u.prepend(c=document.createElement('canvas')),x=c.getContext('2d'),c.width=18,c.height=14,s=u.innerText,r=1,i=28+s.length;i--;i>>29>X*X/3+Y/2&&x.fillRect(6+2*X,2*Y,2,2)&x.fillRect(6-2*X,2*Y,2,2):r+=s.charCodeAt(i-28,x.fillStyle='#'+(r>>8&0xFFFFFF).toString(16)))r^=r>>17,r^=r>2

    Dev tools · 2022

  • Tome Beta697

    The storytelling tool for work

    Work · 2022 · tome.app

  • Kairn694

    Regain control over your days

    Dev tools · 2022

  • AG

    Life & fun · 2022 · backofyourhand.com