Automatic Flashlight Tag Damage Sensor

You’re out at night and playing a boisterous game of flashlight tag. But how can you tell if you’ve been mortally wounded by your opponents light beam? [Kenyer] solved this problem by building a flashlight tag damage sensor which is worn by each participant. It adds a bit of the high-tech equipment used with laser tag while keeping a low-tech price tag.

The sensor relies on a light dependent resistor to register hits when a flashlight beam passes through the round window. It will only register one hit in a three-second time period. At the end of the game, the total number of hits recorded can be flashed back using an on-board LED to see who is the victor. You can see a demo of this functionality in the clip after the break.

[Kenyer] started with a breadboard prototype using an Arduino as the driver. Obviously the cost of an Arduino for every player is a bit ridiculous. He scaled down the project, running the Arduino code on an ATtiny microcontroller.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLx87CKwnLw&w=470]

6 thoughts on “Automatic Flashlight Tag Damage Sensor

  1. I made something similar with just a 556 timer for a secret-agent laser dodge game. You set a laser pointer to bounce off a couple mirrors and into a sensor, when the beam breaks it trips a buzzer.

    One of the 555s in the 556 turns on for a couple seconds when the circuit is tripped, the other acts as a simple function generator for a piezo buzzer to beep at the offending laser-breaker.

  2. Nice to see a microprocessor development board, be being used as such. No doubt their are many who do so, but the “hacker press” seems not to be finding them, to report on. That my notion that that their are many who do is wishful thinking on my part.

  3. I think it should actually measure the total amount of light that hits the sensor in an analog (A2D) sort of way, rather than discrete “hits”. Perhaps the player would be out once his “light meter” was full or something.

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