This section will be growing shortly, but for now, here's:

A scanned in copy of the quick start guide for the PicStic
 

You may be interested to know that the Angel SE uses a PIC16C620-04/P as a microcontroller (Curt notes that the original Angel boards use PIC12C508s, and in fact Curt's own Gabriel LCD board uses a 12CE519, while his upcoming 'Morlock' uber-board will use a 12CE674).

Pete 'Simmsey' Simms and Paul Westaway have been working on a fascinating project to develop an Angel work-alike based only on what they've found on WDP's website. The main page is at http://members.aol.com/peters7907/Paintball/angel.htm, and the electronics are detailed at http://members.aol.com/peters7907/micro.html.

Edward Kang has also been hard at work on the software side of electro guns, and has posted code at http://www.nd.edu/~ekang/version5.asm.txt (mirrored here) to upgrade the old Pneuventures Shocker to include a 'turbo' mode (which Edward refers to as 'ESP' :-)  Edward has also created a very nice list of parts used in the Sandridge Force5 cocker at http://www.nd.edu/~ekang/cocker.html (mirrored here).  Anyone wishing to create their own electro cocker may find it a very helpful list, as Edward notes that the F5 "uses almost entirely off-the-shelf parts to make the gun into a formidable and reliable marker".

Meanwhile, rk (uh, Richard something-or-other :-)  has begun attacking the cocker end of the elecro spectrum and has developed some C code shown at http://homeloaf.dynip.com/~rk/paintball_cocker.c.txt.  Richard is using "a Microchip PIC 16F84 with a Warp-13 Programmer, High Tech Software's free PICLite compiler, and MPLab from Microchip."

Richard adds:
"I'll send up the schematics sometime, although they're not too complicated. I have the PIC at the center of everything, and two IRF540 power FET's with 1N4934's for flyback protection. IRF540's handle something like 27 amps... Course I wouldn't recommend it, but it's a rather generic design that could be used for other applications needing power control. I did have rotary dip switches for delay setting, but I decided to get rid of those to reduce part count, and instead am going to provide an in-system programming port for those kinds of changes. I still have a bunch of pins left over as a result, so I'm going to leave an expansion header so you can somewhere, possibly in the grip."

Richard's homepage can be found at http://homeloaf.dynip.com/~rk/.

For my own experiments, I've been using a PIC16F877 hooked up to Humphrey solenoid valves via an IFR510 Power MOSFET from Radio Shack.  The 16F877 is admittedly way overkill for such a project (the popular 16F84 is a much more reasonable choice), but it was already breadboarded from a previous project.  I use a Microchip PICstart Plus programmer and the CCS C compiler for development.

Let's hope that Curt's business partners will let him release some code at some point!  <grin>