When I was in college, I was always interested in the relationship between the software I had written and the hardware provided to me in various electronics labs. At FAU our focus was primarily on learning how to program the TI MSP430 family of microprocessors. I remember spending weeks learning the instruction set for the MSP430 so that I would be able to pass my assembly language exams. We covered the normal ABET required algorithms, which were interesting, but I really wanted my microprocessor to do something useful.

One night I was finishing an assignment in the FAU electronics lab and one of the TA's for my class handed me an Arduino Micro and explained to me that the language was very similar to C/C++ and that I should be able to pick it up very easily. He was right. At the time I was working on a replica Enigma cipher machine and I needed a way to spin the rotors so that my plain text could be encrypted to cipher text. I remember staying up really late that night learning how to use the servo library and writing a sketch that would help me finish the Enigma project.

Alright, so at this point I was wondering what else the Arduino was capable of. I looked around my room and remembered my Angel paintball marker that I had bought second hand back in 2009. I decided that I was going to build a replacement circuit board to replace the aging OEM board that the marker came with. This blog will detail my build.