Maker Recreates a Portal Sentry Turret in Real Life

If you’ve played the game Portal, you’re certainly familiar with the automated sentry turrets that can riddle targets with machine guns. Though dangerous in the game, they are quite fascinating, and USF student Steven Gioiosa decided to make his own version as part of University of South Florida’s Makecourse.

The device, which was designed in Solidworks and employs an Arduino Uno for control, features arms that pop out using a servo and rack-and-pinion mechanism.

Once extended, each of these arms has a servo-driven laser that moves back and forth in response to how close the target is, sensed using an HC-SR04 ultrasonic module.