Build Your Own Haunted Shooting Gallery With a LASER Gun! 🎯 👻

Have you heard of home haunts? I found out about them a couple years ago. Apparently they are very popular. Haunting.Net defines it as this:

"Home Haunts are walkthrough / mazes designed expressly to scare audience members built in a family home or yard and run during the Halloween season. They are mostly free or donation-based."

This is exactly the case for Wicker Manor. This home haunt is pretty amazing and I was especially excited to work with them in building a haunted shooting gallery. The theme for this home haunt is an old western style gold mine. But This year was extra special to me because they wanted to add a shooting gallery and I am honored to be able to play a small part at Wicker Manor. So in this Instructables, we will see how the shooting gallery was made.

Please watch the video above to see the complete build in addition to a good story. 😊

You can find out more about Wicker Manor's home haunt and even have a walkthrough by watching this video.

1. 1866 BB-Gun
2. Motor Vibration
3. Lasers
4. Photo Sensors
5. Relay Board
6. 4 conductor wire
7. 5 conductor connector
8. 8Gb SD Cards
9. MP3 Modules
10. 12V 10Amp power supply
11. Mega screw terminal board
12. Remote trigger
13. 100Watt amps
14. 6" Speakers
15. Arduino Mega 2560
16. Mosfet trigger
17. NPN Transistors
18. White LEDS
19. Fresnel Lens 7709-2

You can see how all of these were used in video.

There are some other parts you will obviously need to like animatronic props. Wicker Manor already had all of these but you can use whatever you'd like. In fact, not all of the props need to move. One of the props Wicker Manor had was a stick of dynamite that just had a 'blow up' sound. Movement does make it all more exciting though.

There are only a few main steps to create a shooting gallery.

To start off, we will make the targets. We wanted these to be laser activated so decided to use photo sensors. Because a laser is just an intense focused beam of light, these should work really well. The advantage of a laser is that targets can be very close together. The bad thing is that the laser has to hit the center of the target or the Fresnel lens. So accuracy is more important, and I think that makes it more fun.

We created our own design for these targets because we wanted them to light up at night. I printed the base out in white and the outer ring in red to make it look more like a target. We glued the red ring to the base then added the photo sensor and the white LEDs.

The LEDs are all in parallel, so all the negative legs are connected and all the positive legs are connected together. The makes them all receive the same voltage across them. We also added a 120ohm resistor inline so they don't pull too much current.

For the laser gun we modified an old style BB-Gun. There are only a few steps for this but took me a while in real time so I don't want to make it sound easier than it is.

First thing I did was find a location for the trigger to activate a switch. Luckily this BB-Gun has a little platform I could mount a small push button switch. If fit perfectly and I didn't have to modify anything aside from gluing the button down. SOOO lucky!

Next thing we did was print out a new tip in orange PLA and push a little laser into it. These lasers are really cheap and you can get 10 for about a dollar each. Unfortunately, the lens on the laser wasn't straight so we had to add some adjustments. I did this by adding screws to the tip so you can get everything lined up. It worked really well. The tip used M2 screws with threaded inserts.

If you'd like, you can also add some haptic feedback like a vibration motor. We did this and it seemed like a great idea but it made the laser shake too much and hard to hit the target, so we actually turned it off.

Final step is adding a connection from the gun to the controller. I used aviation style connectors for this and a 5 conductor cable. I guess you could use ethernet cable too if you are not using the haptic feedback which may pull too much current for those thin wires.

Well this is the craziest part of the build because we have to smoosh a lot of components into a little project box.

1. Mega 2560
2. Mega 2560 expansion board
3. 2x MP3 players dfPlayers
4. 2x 100watt audio amps
5. Relay board with 8 channels
6. MOSFET switch
7. 8x NPN transistors
8. Remote control switch

To get everything in, I stacked the components.

I created a bottom layer plate that I could put threaded inserts into, to hold down the audio amps and the relay board. I then added a second deck on top of this to add the mega 2560 with the expansion board.

On top of the expansion board I added 2 MP3 players and the 8 NPN transistors. We need transistors to act like switch for this project because all 8 targets on with the lights pulled almost 800ma and the Mega 2560 can only handle 200ma output power on its digital IO.

If you are using a haptic feedback then you should also add in a mosfet switch to handle the current of the the motor which will be about 2amps.

The power input was 12V, so we had to use a 5V regulator to not damage the Mega, photo sensors, or the LEDs

The game is basically a state machine. (Waiting, Starting, Playing, Ending)

Here are the basic rules for how we setup the haunted shooting gallery game.

1. A game runs for 30 seconds
2. The games starts with either a push button or the remote control
3. At the start, there is a randomized sound welcoming the player to the game
4. The target lights are all controlled independently, they will breathe and flash while not in play
5. The trigger, laser, and haptic feedback are all controlled independently
6. When not in play and the trigger is pulled an empty gun sound will play, no laser output
7. When in play and the trigger is pulled, the laser will stay on for 250ms and the haptic feedback will be active for 100ms
8. If a target is received within the 250ms then that target is 'hit'
9. Turn off the target lights for 5000ms (disable the target)
10. Turn on that target's prop sound
11. Turn on that target's prop relay for set amount of time
12. At the end of the game, randomize the exit sound
13. If 3 targets where hit in a row, play a special sound
14. If 3 targets where missed in a row, play a special sound

The software is below if you'd like to take a peek of how it worked.

One very interesting thing about the DFPlayer MP3 players and the audio amps is that you CANNOT connected the negative sides of the audio out to the amps. For some reason this will blow out the MP3 player. So I just had the positive side of the audio out from the audio player going to the input of the amp and it worked fine. Some mysteries I'll just go with. You can see this in the last picture with the green wires (positive), no negative side connected.

For power I used a 10Amp 12V power supply because of the 100watt audio amps can pull a lot of amps. They are VERY loud. I connected the output of the amps to 6" speakers.

One speaker played gun sounds while the other played prop sounds. We have two MP3 players so we can play 2 sounds at the same time. Otherwise when a new sound starts, it will interrupt and stop the current sound playing.

Most of the props we used were mechanical already so they had movement when plugged in. Just no sounds but we added that in the last step.

The relay board can handle 120AC too so we just cut one side of the cord going to the prop and connected it through the relay. Then adjusted the timing of the software to activate the prop for a set amount of time. Otherwise, the props work as normal, we just control when they get power.

Remember to unplug the cord when cutting into it!

Growing up I loved to play shooting galleries. Most of the ones we played did not show where you hit because they were IR based. But the little red light on the target would turn off if you hit it. Then the most exciting part, the animatronics would start to move. Like a piano player or a tin can shooting up on a thin wire.

I hope you can build one for yourself and have fun playing it. Vintage style shooting galleries are a lot of fun.

Please check out the video of Wicker Manor's haunted gold mine walk though, its amazing.

For improvements you could add a score or a timer to see how many targets you can hit. I had to manually keep count when people were playing. But was still a lot of fun. I would also get higher quality lasers. These worked great at first but would burn out after about 1,000 triggers and get very dim.