This DIY lasertag project designed by [Nii], which he brought to Tokyo Maker Faire back in September, is a treasure trove. It’s all in Japanese and you’ll need to visit X (formerly Twitter) to see it, but the images do a fine job of getting the essentials across and your favorite translator tool will do a fair job of the rest.
There’s a whole lot to admire in this project. The swing-out transparent OLED display is super slick, the electronics are housed on a single PCB, the back half of the grip is in fact a portable USB power bank that slots directly in to provide power, and there’s a really smart use of a short RGB LED strip for effects.
The optical elements show some inspired design, as well. An infrared LED points forward, and with the help of a lens, focuses the beam tightly enough to make aiming meaningful. For detecting hits, the top of the pistol conceals a custom-made reflector that directs any IR downward into a receiver, making it omnidirectional in terms of hit sensing but only needing a single sensor.
Want to know more? Check out [Nii]’s earlier prototypes on his website. It’s clear this has been in the works for a while, so if you like seeing how a project develops, you’re in for a treat.
As for the choice of transparent OLED displays? They are certainly cool, and we remember how wild it looks to have several stacked together.
The link seems to be broken (as the platform that it was on)
no, the link is not broken.
Since so many people can’t figure out where to look, here are neet2121’s blog posts:
General overview:
https://neet2121.hatenablog.com/entry/2021/10/05/220916
Laser design and parts:
https://neet2121.hatenablog.com/entry/2020/01/12/025139
A reference they used:
https://wazalabo.com/shooting_lens.html
Much more useful than the actual post – thank you.
Very neat looking, but very thin on the documentation side, which make the project pretty moot..
Here’s the twitter video link to one of the “formerly known as twitter” tweets
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1837400132041752576/pu/vid/avc1/1280×720/axpXETeReMXySBUF.mp4?tag=12
and a long video
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1831335194504441856/pu/vid/avc1/1280×720/lF7zdXqJHfU9w36n.mp4?tag=12
You’d be surprised at how many sites won’t load once you’ve blocked tracking cookies.
Yep twitX is one.
so conflicted people are with X. I wish it was still called Twitter but the same people who hate Elon own a Tesla. I even feel like I’m doing to much with this comment because this is a tech site people not a politico 😛
That’s kind-of strawman-y. It doesn’t really matter though — people don’t just hate Twitter because they hate Musk; they hate it because of what he’s done to it.
What has he done to it? Are you against free speech?
Imagine not liking X because the most successful perosn alive owns it
Clown logic.
People hate it because of the changes he made when he bought it. Which I think is a fair reason, no? If a product fundamentally changes, your opinion on it can change as well.
And then there are plenty that didn’t like it when it was Twitter and like it even less now that it is X.
Obviously this design is freaking amazing. If you ever need to go 100m with a bog standard led and can afford a little farther focal distance, I made this. https://youtu.be/aKUF_zrhvQg
Nice project, anyone have a link to the same kind of open source project that I can build ? thanks :-)
twitX link doesn’t for me (no cookies/no account), so forgive me if this is addressed already:
Seeing how beat up the lasertag equipment gets around here, I really wonder if that display will survive a single game. It looks very much in harms way there.