Help with solenoid choice for recoil

[BlackDragon2020]

So I hav not been able to find a lot on solenoid choice when making a recoil mod. I have found lots of info on them burning up, going bad because of full automatic.

I'm looking to turn a nerf rival pistol in to a light gun. Looking for some feed back on the recoil side of things.

[Howard_Casto]

If/When I ever build an ultimate light gun I'm probably going with a two output solution...... a simple solenoid for pistol games and a rumble motor or a piston for the automatics.    I absolutely think it's possible to do both with a solenoid, but nobody seems to have found a suitable model yet. 

[BlackDragon2020]

Yea I plan on using both as I'm going to be using jaybee's setup. I just don't want to get gunk.

[Podbod]

Given TC3 + TC4  had a slide recoil and had a machine gun in the game. How did that Solenoid cope. Was it just that there was a max number of bullets so they could be sure it wouldn't burn out?

[sniiki]

Anyone using two or more coils to ease the duty cycle?

[Howard_Casto]

Anyone using two or more coils to ease the duty cycle?

That's an excellent idea.  The hardware would have to be custom though and you'd have to find space to cram more than one in there, but that's still a good idea.   

[BlackDragon2020]

I was just tossing the idea around, but found my self lacking understanding of how the recoil works. I have seen Guns with just a coil that has its plunger go back and forth, plungers going back and forth with a weight on the end, and then the namcos.

Does the slide coming back and hitting that plate cause more of a recoil or is it just for the look of the gun shooting? Does having a solenoid just going back and forth in the gun not on anything work?

[sniiki]

More weight = more powerful recoil effect.

[JayBee]

Yeah there are so many different models out there with different specs and quality, it's hard to know which one will work best.

I believe TC4 has limited machine gun ammo to avoid using the recoil too much? The gun also has some vent on the side that are blowing the air inside when the recoil comes back into place.

I think there might be a better way to cool down the solenoid while it's working, but I haven't had time to look into that yet.

Meanwhile the best next thing is indeed to use one solenoid for normal hit and rumble motor for full auto. It actually works really nicely with a big motor.
You can also use a temperature sensor to reduce the solenoid speed if it gets too hot.

Anyone using two or more coils to ease the duty cycle?

Tell me if you manage to fit 2 solenoid inside a shell, I'd gladly help you supporting that 

[sniiki]

Was planning to build some custom scifi gun, routing the body from aluminum and leaving everything exposed so there should be room to add all sorts of contraptions. I thought to add an ATTiny or something to switch the triggered coil with controllers without an open source code but sure, if you can add it in I'd be even better! Another thing I was gonna add there was monitoring for the solenoid as I have managed to set my virtual pinball cabinet on fire previously due to a bug either in game rom or in DOF script. In my VP cab I just added voltage monitoring from mosfet outputs and a timer to cut the supply to whole mosfet board in case any sw/hw glitch occurs.
A side note: I was initially blamed for screwing up the wiring etc and told that no-one had faced such issue during several years of usage but in the end authors did check the code and were able to repeat it so, yeah, ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- happens and even those cheap tiny solenoids catch on fire quite quickly if left on.

I also thought about using another kind of recoil mechanism but was wondering how easy it is to sync the effect with the game? Of course if it's a rapid firing gun your brain wont probably notice the difference.

[JayBee]

Was planning to build some custom scifi gun, routing the body from aluminum and leaving everything exposed so there should be room to add all sorts of contraptions. I thought to add an ATTiny or something to switch the triggered coil with controllers without an open source code but sure, if you can add it in I'd be even better! Another thing I was gonna add there was monitoring for the solenoid as I have managed to set my virtual pinball cabinet on fire previously due to a bug either in game rom or in DOF script. In my VP cab I just added voltage monitoring from mosfet outputs and a timer to cut the supply to whole mosfet board in case any sw/hw glitch occurs.
A side note: I was initially blamed for screwing up the wiring etc and told that no-one had faced such issue during several years of usage but in the end authors did check the code and were able to repeat it so, yeah, ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- happens and even those cheap tiny solenoids catch on fire quite quickly if left on.

I also thought about using another kind of recoil mechanism but was wondering how easy it is to sync the effect with the game? Of course if it's a rapid firing gun your brain wont probably notice the difference.

Yeah it should be easy enough to implement by using 2 solenoid instead of solenoid + rumble.
Indeed solenoids can easily burn out if hold down for even few seconds. Quite scary stuff. I'm using some security measure in my firmware to avoid this kind of issues.

Another recoil mechanism that works well but also has its own weakness is a recoil driven by a motor.

On my system you can pretty much command the feedbacks and change their behavior the way you want.
In combo with softwares like Mamehooker and Demulshooter to link the game with the gun through serial, it works very nicely.