Removing the shim couldn’t be easier – shown in the picture to the left is my regulator, taken apart because my O-rings were bad. It’s not necessary to disassemble the bottom “swivel feed” of the regulator like I have, just remove it from your marker’s ASA, then grab the two sections shown in the photo and unscrew them apart. Note that the bottom potion “swivels” and if you’re trying to turn the regulator body in relation to the inlet tube you’ll get a whole lotta nowhere.

Once you have it in two pieces (there’s a spring in there but it shouldn’t shoot apart like a blow-back marker does when you take out the field-strip pin) remove the short, fat main spring. Underneath it, probably stuck to the piston is the shim. If it’s stuck, take something soft-ish like a pencil and push the piston out gently, then use something like an exacto-knife to separate the shim from the piston.

To the left, you can see the mainspring and the shim out of the regulator, and stuck together. You should be able to separate them with your fingers, the only thing that was holding them together on mine was the surface tension of the lubricant from inside the regulator. By the way, unless you’re planning on lubricating the regulator, try not to wipe off too much of the lubricant.

It should then just be a simple matter of putting everything but the shim back in the regulator the way you found it, and re-assembling your marker. You’ll have to play with the adjuster to get the pressure where you want it, I’m going to wait until my gauge and new springs get here before playing with it further, so expect another post in the near future.

Addendum 2: This project used to be called B-Trigger, short for “Bovine”, but I like the word “Moo” better.

Warranty Warning: Considering I removed the PIC from my Spyder Flash’s board with a pocket knife, I’m going to take a wild guess and say this will void your warranty. There’s also a pretty real chance you could end up with a marker that doesn’t work at all, so you might wanna think about whether or not you want to wimp out and buy a pre-made board (see below).

Introduction

We started this project as a way to soup-up the internals of a Spyder electronic trigger frame, without having to buy someone else’s invention… e.g., T-board and like replacement boards. If you’re not interested in the nuts and bolts of making triggers work, buying a T-Board or a Virtue Board is probably going to be cheaper and less aggravating.

However, if you want to get your hands dirty, you like programming and soldering, and want the ultimate in customization ability… then this article might just be for you.

The Code

/*
** B-Trigger: Bovine Trigger for Paintball Markers
** http://www.hungryhacker.com/projects/b_trigger
** (C) 2005-2007 Hungry Hacker Industries
*/
#include "msp430x20x1.h"

/*
** setup pins
*/
P1DIR = 0xFF; // all pins output
P1DIR ^= 0x02; // pin 2 input
P1OUT = 0;
for (;;)
{
if (!(P1IN & IO_TRIGGER)) // is trigger pin low
{
P1OUT |= IO_SOLENOID;
P1OUT |= IO_LED;
sleep(DEL_SOLON);
P1OUT &= ~IO_SOLENOID;
P1OUT &= ~IO_LED;
sleep(DEL_SOLOFF);
}
}
/*
** NOT REACHED
*/
return 0;
}

Setting it Up

In the image to the left, you can see the stock board from my Spyder Flash with the PIC removed. If you click on the image, to go to the Flickr photo page, you can see notes on the photo telling you what some of the various pins are for.

It should be noted that other versions of the Spyder E-Trigger probably have vastly different boards, even down to other Flash models (it stands to reason that the Flash LCD will have a different board). You’ll need to break out the diagnostic tools before you remove the PIC if you want to follow in my footsteps here.

Next I used some thin wire and jumpered the MSP-430 prototype board to the stock Spyder trigger board, allowing me to control it. You can see the awful mess it looks like in the image to the right. It all fits inside the grip, because the MSP-430 board is tiny – about the size of your thumbnail, give or take.

It Works! Sort of…

After compiling the above code and flashing it to the MSP, I’m left with a full-auto trigger board with arbitrary delays. I had hacked up a semi-auto version, which is more or less just a logic problem (another check to see if the trigger is released, at which point you reset a variable, and only allowing the solenoid to cycle if the variable is reset) – but unfortunately I lost the code.

You can see it operating in the video below, I appologize for the black-and-white, grainy footage:

More to Come:

We’re going to completely build a new board, hopefully even down to etching a PCB, which will make for a nice extension to this article and another on etching PCBs. As yet, we’re still waiting on getting around to order the parts.

Don’t try this at home.