How to design your own board to operate a paintball gun?

[bigvall]

Paintball board design

Where would I find a good schematic on how to design your own board to operate a paintball gun?

 

[evandude]

Re: Paintball board design

**broken link removed**

that is my marker, for which I have done two separate control boards over the course of its construction. The first question I have is: how experienced are you with electronics? there are two totally different routes you can take with the circuitry. one is using a microcontroller, and the other is doing it all without one. My first control board was done using discrete components and timer ICs only... it worked, and it is a feasible way to make a board, but it's about as basic as you can get. Using a microcontroller opens up a lot of doors; digital timing schemes, interactive user interfacing (menu systems, LCD displays, serial communications with a computer, etc etc)

but if you aren't very familiar with microcontrollers then it might be a little much to dive into using them for this kind of an application.

Added after 1 hours 22 minutes:

oh, and as you can see from the pics on my site, the prototype board was rather oversized, filling the whole grip frame... currently I'm working on a twin-stacked board design that uses a lot of SMD components and can fit in a grip alongside a 9v battery.

what kind of marker are you looking to control? my application is a dual-solenoid design, so its about as complex as it gets, but can be easily scaled down for a single-solenoid design for use on a different marker...

i'm mainly asking because it wouldn't do you a whole lot of good if i gave you intricate dual-sided board designs and PIC code if you didn't have the experience to actually do anything with something that complex.