Laser tagging (homemade laser tagging game)

Sep 10, 2006 5 Replies
B

After playing laser tagging for a few weeks, i was wondering if it would be possible to design a simple version of the equipment for practice purposes. Pulsing a laser pointer should be not so hard but i'm not so sure of the receiver end. Ideal would be the following:



Sender, laser pointer built into toy gun, trigger will allow pointer to pulse for a quarther second and then go off, repeated pulling of trigger will cause pulses but never a continues beam. Receiver end will start beeping and/or flashing for 4 seconds when hit, gun would always be connected to receiver and would be disabled during the 4 seconds of being hit. I know the equipment is available but very expensive, and it should be possible to create this. Eventual option would be a player hit counter, but that's not important at this stage. Any suggestions?



Bart Bervoets


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H

Isn't there a cheap toy version?

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B

Yes, there is, but i wanted to do slightly better then just that. Of course i could use the toy version and modify the electronics, but the toy version does not use a laser.

Bart Bervoets

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H

I assumed it would use the laser pointer type laser.

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E

Greetings Bart, You could use any cheap IR remote control to pulse the laser. You can buy IR remote control kits. You can build your own reciever using the info from this link:

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You can use the output that pulses the IR LED to pulse your laser pointer. Since the laser is pulsed at 40kHz and your reciever is made to only recognise this frequency it will ignore ambient light. You can use a 555 timer circuit to turn on the remote for the 1/4 second requirement. The reciever can be used to trigger another 555 timer circuit to disconnect power to the firing circuit for the 4 second requirement. Google for IR remote control and 555 timer circuits. There is a ton of info on the web about these. ERS

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S

be

gun

Do you need to disable the gun for 4 seconds, or just have the receiver ignore it for 4 seconds? If the latter, you don't need the gun to be always connected to the receiver. The 40kHz sounds like a good idea in theory, but when I tried using a laser pointer for data transmission a few years ago, about the best I could get was 1kHz. That might have been due to the particular brand of pointer that I used, from "Jaycar" in Australia.

... Steve

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