£5 toy gun that can be used as a VR peripheral? Sure, why not! Is it worth it? Probably not, go buy the Hyperkin Blaster. Tinkering is fun though.

I had been looking around at existing peripherals for a client, and thought about how easy it must be to make your own gun using the tracker puck and a children’s toy… so I decided to try it.

I did see a really nice “Action Force Rifle” for £15 in Asda yesterday, but decided to start a bit smaller with a £5 Nerf rifle which would also be a bit more accessible to the masses.

So without further ado, you will need:

The Reflex IX-1 Nerf Gun, or your Nerf flavour of choice (it’s all gonna be pretty similar)

Some wire

A hot glue gun

A screwdriver

A Vive Tracking Puck

A hell of a lot of patience

WARNING: Some of the things I did to make this happen are pretty silly ways to go about it, like melting plastic with a soldering iron. Don’t do anything dangerous, don’t do drugs, stay in school.

Step 1

First off, we need to take the damn thing apart. Just undo every screw you can find until the case comes off — you’ll need to take off the cocking mechanism first. Careful, the contents will probably explode everywhere when you open it up, because despite the big modding community Nerf like to make these things are difficult as possible to put back together.

You should end up with something like this:

Step 2

Now we need to make a route for the wires. Take out the barrel, hammer, trigger, etc and move that to one side for now.

First we need to drill a hole or two. Drill out one hole big enough to take one of the wires as per below — ignore the other holes, they were mistakes. We also need to cut down the plastic in that area, which it turns out is relatively easy with a craft knife as the plastic is incredibly malleable. Yes, there’s already a wire glued in below, I had to go back and change my approach from two holes to a hole and a cut-out. Ignore the wire for now.

Then, down by the trigger area we need to cut a channel for the wires to go through. I’ve circled it below to be helpful. You can see the wire top right to get an idea of where I’m talking about, this is just below where the trigger sits.

On both halves of the orange body, you’ll need to cut a channel in the top. You can do what I did — be very silly by using a soldering iron and end up inhaling some melting plastic fumes — or you can take the sensible route and use a craft knife like you’re peeling a very, very tough carrot. You should end up with the below, note that it goes all the way to the back.

Step 3

That’s the orange part out of the way, next you need to drill a couple of holes in the cocking mechanism. Conveniently, there’s a very good candidate where the clip for accessories once was (see below in my hand-shaky photo). Drill out a couple of holes in the middle of that but don’t put the wire through just yet.

Step 4

Time to set up the wiring. Strip the insulation from one end of each wire and hot glue them as below, don’t forget to burn yourself on the hot glue a couple of times if you want to exactly replicate my process. Take note that the lower wire is attached to the trigger mechanism, not the body of the gun.

Step 5

Now we’re going to make it neat and tidy. If you’d like you can test it here, but I live on the edge so didn’t bother till I’d put everything back together. If you want to test it, jump to Step 7.

Run the wires as per below, hot gluing where appropriate to keep it in place (remember there are moving parts in this gun). Most importantly, make sure you leave some slack in the handle of the gun (where the imaginary magazine would be) for the wire attached to the trigger mechanism, it needs to be able to pull the wire up and make contact with the one attached to the body!

Step 6

Now you can put it back together. I’m not going to go into the horrendously complex process of trying to get a Nerf gun back together, there are plenty of guides for modding this gun which will show you how to position things when putting it back together.

You should end up with something that looks like the below.

If you did, congratulations, that was the hard part.

Step 7

Wire the gun to pins 4 and 2 (see below) however you see fit. I just clamped them in there loosely for testing

Borrowed from the Tracker Developer Guidelines, thanks HTC!

Then try out any game (or put together something quick in Unity) to test if it works. If it does, great! If it doesn’t, check everything and try again.

Mounting Solutions

There are various 3D printable mounting solutions up on Thingiverse you can try out, I’ve listed some below

I’m going with the 1st one personally, but haven’t gotten round to printing it yet. Then you can use some foil tape or something else conductive to make the pin rest conductive for each pin (the second link shows you how to do this) and you can mount and unmount the puck with ease!

Don’t ask me how to attach the mount to the gun, I haven’t gotten that far yet. I wanted to get this write-up done while I have some spare time.

Final Thoughts

I did consider adding a second set of wires for reloading and attaching them to the cocking mechanism, but there are so few games that use that system it would only really be useful on my own projects — and generally I’d be wanting to use something a bit more professional for that. If you want to, you absolutely can — just take another wire from GND (pin 2) and attach it to 3, 5 or 6 (grip, trackpad, menu).

Now that I now this works, I might try that Action Force gun with vibration motors and all. Pin 1 provides haptic output so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for controlling those motors — I doubt they need more than 3.3v.

Stay tuned for the next episode, when we’ll be attaching a Vive tracker to a live grenade!