Help with ideas and thoughts...

[MarcG]

My son has Cerebral Palsy and one of his exercises involves standing up straight while practicing to place his weight equally on both feet. Using an Arduino and four pressure sensors I have a basic weight bearing setup that lights an LED green when good and Red when bad...That is way too boring for a four year old so I'd love to vamp it up to laser gun level and make his exercising at least a bit fun!

Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions or help would be appreciate with this undertaking!

Basically, when my son's weight is balanced equally on both feet on the stand the laser gun should become active. At the same time the target will go live and be a haphazard series of photoresistors that will randomly become available to shoot at. Hits will be counted. Misses will be counted also.

The gun will have the following failsafes builtin: 1) an accel/compass sensor that will be calibrated (on startup) to accept only the direction/angle of the target board. 2) a photoresistor that will also calibrate on startup to shut the gun with the slightest light variation 3) a distance sensor (calibrated on startup) to determine distance to wall...anything gets in way it shuts gun) and 4) finally a motion sensor at the weight bearing stand (pointing away from my son) which will also shut off the gun if there is any motion between the gun and target.

My questions!:
1) Can you foresee major flaws, problems in this idea?!
2) What equipment would you suggest I use to make all parts communicate wirelessly together (gun, weight pressure stand and target).
3) Would you suggest I use an Arduino to control each of the three parts (i.e. gun, weight pressure stand and target) or is there a better way?

Sure there are a billion other question...but none coming out and I've blabbed enough.

Any help on this endeavour would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you in advance,
Marc

[adafruit_support_bill]

That sounds like an awesome project. I hope you plan to get your son involved in making it too.

Do you have a budget in mind? The individual subsystems should be reasonably straightforward considering that you have already completed the pressure platform. Wireless interconnect options range from fairly low-cost IR, through Xbee modules and on up to CC3000 WiFi.

What are you using for a processor now for the pressure platform? You could go Arduinos all the way around. You might be able to do the basic target functionality with a Trinket, but adding wireless communication to that might be a stretch.

For the gun, I would look at our 9 DOF IMU and a Maxbotix sensor. A PIR motion sensors would be simple to integrate with your platform.