New pound-shop guns for quickdraw shootout game

Just over a week ago, we built a simple "quickdraw shootout" game using some toy guns from a local 99p store. The game worked well enough - the idea is that a tilt switch tells the embedded microcontroller when the gun has been tipped such that it is horizontal (ie. it has been moved from the vertical position in it's holster, to a horizontal position - simulating the motion of taking it out of the holster and pointing it at an opponent).

Once the gun has registered as being horizontal, pulling the trigger causes the mcu to send a signal to a host device. The host device listens for these messages and reports back which gun was "fired" first (since only shots are recognised after the gun has been held horizontally, it makes the players actually draw their guns before pulling the trigger). Despite working in practice, we've not really done much with the guns following the trial at BuildBrighton last week. Maybe it's because they were so small and obviously "child-sized".

Paul Bash sorted this out for us, with some awesome monster-sized guns he picked up recently.
To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee, "that's not a gun.... now that's a gun"

These bright orange monstrosities just need a spray coat of black and a bit of silver acrylic drybrushing to make them look less nasty. But with a massive bullet chamber, and a nice big wood-effect handle, these could easily take a 9v PP3 battery in the handle and there's plenty of space inside for electronics gubbins.

These are going to make awesome quickdraw guns - we've got our single-wire data transfer working between two PICs and have managed to get a pin state to display wirelessly across our 433Mhz RF modules (write up to follow). We've already proved the gun firing code works. All that's left is to put the whole lot together and actually get the quickdraw game working!