Monday, March 25, 2013

Feral IR Design #1

After being out sick for over a week, I finally was able to finished this design of the Feral IR Sensor.  I lucked out by finding these cheap bicycle light flashers at the local 99 cent store.

Check out the video and give me your thoughts, comments and ideas on how to improve things.



Design #1 - Feral IR Sensor from Windjammer Entertainment on Vimeo.

The biggest thing I'm not happy with is the on/off mechanism.  I can foresee a lot of problems with it in game play.  Hot gluing it to the side of the sensor is not a good solution since it can easily get ripped off.  I'm seriously thinking of removing the jack/plug idea for this sensor and replacing it with some kind of switch - possibly a large push-button.  Not sure at this point.  Any creative solutions out there?

7 comments:

aarons102 said...

Would it be possible to make it beep or something to signal hits or out? (Thought there might not be room for that in that case)

Dustin said...

Easiest way to add sound is a buzzer from radioshack. This one costs $4. but there are others. "75dB Piezo Electric Buzzer operates on 1.5-3VDC"

SherpaDoug said...

Consider using a magnetic reed switch to turn it off. Remove the magnet to activate it and replace the magnet with a bit of tape when you are done. Remove the batteries for long term storage.

Jammer said...

I love the reed switch idea. The original concept is to have some kind of cord a zombie can easily pull, similar to pulling off a flag in flag football. The reed switch looks like a great solution.

I also like the idea of adding a buzzer. The problem is that I don't have much room inside that tiny device. How tiny do they make those speaker/buzzers?

SherpaDoug said...

Is this programmed in the Arduino environment or is the processor programmed directly in C or assembly?

Jammer said...

SherpaDoug - Yes, it's programmed in the Arduino environment. I followed this tutorial...

http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=1695

...to 'shrinkify' everything and it works perfectly.

Unknown said...

Are you still using the receiving code discussed in the Forum thread? (http://lt-mmo.blogspot.com/p/forums.html)

Would you post your current Feral code?