Zombie Tag!

The Zombie Sensors are alive! Yes, it's been a very long time since my last post. I had a huge setback with the sensors several months ago and little time to fix them. But when I got a call from the City of Walnut asking me to provide laser tag for their Halloween Zombie Tag maze - I had to get the sensors working again. Thankfully this was a paid job, so I was able to find the time to bring the sensor back to life.  BTW, here is a video of the walk through of the Zombie Tag event...


In my last post, I had built a reflow oven which will allow me to assemble several sensors at one time. Unfortunately, after populating 100 boards I had an 80% failure rate on all of my assembled sensors! AAARRRGGG!!! After all of that time - after all of that effort - after all of that money spent - an 80% failure rate on everything was a really tough blow to this project. I spent more time testing everything, but I couldn't figure out what went wrong. I had to put the project on hold.

Thankfully my pal Brian Farley came to my rescue and examined everything and came to the conclusion that the reflow process caused micro traces on the MCU that caused it to fail. So he came up with a solution that involved a lot of soldering and re-working each PCB board. It finally took me a month of work, but I was able to get 24 Zombie Sensors to work reliably for the City of Walnut Zombie Tag event. And after two evenings of heavy use, the sensors performed great! I had no failures and they functioned as intended.

So where do I go from here? I know a lot of people would like to purchase these sensors. I have parts to assemble several more. Unfortunately they will take a lot of time to get functioning properly and even more time to test to make sure all of the micro-traces are gone. If/when I sell them. I want to make sure they operate as intended. So until then, stay tuned!

Zombies Sensors - Sold Out!

Well that didn't take long! Our first batch of Zombie Sensors is now sold out - or at least spoken for.

So where we're at now, these orders still need to be paid for. I'll be working to pack them up and get shipping quotes and finally issuing invoices to the customers. If any orders don't get paid - I'll put the sensors back up for sale.

For those of you who missed out and still want to purchase the Zombie Sensor - please e-mail me at rwb134@gmail.com and I'll put you on the waiting list. This will be very helpful to know how many more sensors to make. So if you want one, please don't be shy. Thanks again everyone!

Now Taking International Orders!

I have 40 Zombie Sensors available for order and I'm now opening it up to international customers!

These sensors, normally $20, are on an introductory sale of $15 each (plus shipping & handling)!

I've gotten a lot of request from other countries and these will be sold on a first come first serve basis. For more details, please visit this link.

ZOMBIE SENSOR - NOW ON SALE!!!

Thank you all for your patience - and yes, the wait is over! I now have 40 ZOMBIE SENSORS MKii available for sale! I'll be offering these at the fantastic TagFest 2014 price of $15 each!

These sensors have been enhanced with new features not seen anywhere else. With any LTTO tagger, you can mass-program multiple sensors at one time and you can customize the sensors to your liking. New features in the MKII are...

Zombie Sensor MKII

After much trial and error, I've finally put together a TRAINING VIDEO that goes over virtually ALL of the nifty cool features of the brand spanking new ZOMBIE SENSOR MARK II!!!  I've worked long and hard getting the software ready and it seems like all of the bugs are worked out of it. We used these sensors at the 2014 TAGFEST this past July. After much play-testing, I found ways to improve the operation.  The biggest challenge was finding a way to change modes of several of these sensors at once. And thanks to Ryan "Izzy" Bales's genius suggestion, I now have a fantastic method for controlling several Zombie Sensors at the same time.

Updating

Back from TagFest 2014 this year and it was awesome! We were at a new location this year that did not disappoint. If you ever have the opportunity to attend a TagFest, you need to do so at least once in your life. We played so many games, both conventional and unconventional -  some involving a golf cart to act as a tank and other great night games called "THING", "WEREWOLVES", and of course "ZOMBIES"!

SALE OPPORTUNITY!

At TagFest 2014 this year, we'll be making, for the first time, some of our products available for sale!

First up is the new Zombie Sensor MKII! I'll have about 50 of these and can be purchase for $15 each.  These sensors can be operated in three modes and can accept tags from LTTO, LTX and LTAR while rejecting beacon noise. Mega Tags does multiple points worth of damage, depending on the mode you're playing. We will be play testing these at night, so if you're in the area, come by and check them out!

We will also be selling prototypes of the long awaited NOMAD MKII this year! The NOMAD is a portable, hand-held hosting unit for LTTO/LTX & LTAR games. These will be fully functional units but they are still prototypes since we are still putting the final touches on the final case design/engineering. The NOMAD prototypes will be on sale for the special TagFest price of $100. However we will only have about 5 of them on hand. The final product, when they are ready, will be sold for $175.  Users who get the prototype and want to upgrade them to the final case design will have this option. The cost for this upgrade has yet to be determined.

All items will ONLY be sold to TagFest participants.

PROJECT UPDATES

Even thought it's been quite here on my blog, I've been busily working on updating all of my projects
- which has been actually pretty intense. So I'd thought I'd take a quick timeout from coding on the Arduino to bring everyone up to speed.

ZOMBIE SENSOR - This project has been known as the FERAL IR SENSOR - it will get a formal name change soon.  Last summer the "Mark I" version was used extensively at TagFest. I've been working on some updates to help improve upon the "Mark I" and it's looking really nice. I'll be making an announcement soon about this, along with a video to show off what's different.

Sold Out!

The entire first batch of the Feral IR Sensors Mk-I has been purchased. The funds from this sale will be put back into making another batch soon. If you're interested in owning a few of these, please post here (along with an estimated quantity) so we can gauge the demand. This will help us to know how many to make. Thanks everyone for your support!

Feral IR Sensor MK-I, 18 UNITS FOR SALE!

I know it's been a long wait, but I'm now selling off the first batch of Feral IR Sensors Mark-I. These are the same sensors used in TagFest 2013 this past summer and used for night zombie games. I only have 18 of these and I'm going to sell the entire lot for $216 to one lucky person. That comes to $12 a unit! The money will be re-invested back into LT-MMO. Yes, I'm still alive here. Life just has me busy with other things, but I still want to keep the LT-MMO dream alive and create more cool Lazer Tag gadgets.

Back To Reality

TagFest was an absolute blast. The Feral IR Sensor was a huge hit. The picture above is us using the sensors for one of our many night Zombie games which worked really well.

TagFest or Bust

We've been busy getting our devices ready for TagFest which starts on July 19th in Eugene Oregon. At the event we'll be demoing all three gadgets, the Echo Base, Feral IR Sensor and the Nomad.

The Echo Base microcontroller is giving me troubles - I'm hoping to have this fixed in time. I'm looking forward to the interesting games these devices will give us.

The Feral IR Sensors are running perfectly. I'll have 30 units on hand for us to play test and perhaps even sell at the event.  Very much looking forward using these at night for those dark Zombie games!

And the NOMAD, portable hosting station, will also be making it's first public appearance. The picture here is the current design. I'll hopefully have time to take pictures. Look for updates after the event. Exciting stuff!  

Feral batch #1

To test our design and assembly process, we're making 30 units of the Feral IR Sensors. These will be play-tested at TagFest 2013 in Eugene Oregon from July 19-21. If there's no changes needed, we'll move into a limited run.

Stay tuned to LT-MMO for the latest news.

PCB boards!

We'll be testing these boards and making some adjustments. 

Very exciting!

Still waiting...

The test PCB boards for the Feral IR Sensor were ordered a few weeks ago from OSH Park. Still, the current status is listed as "The panel your boards are assigned to has been sent to the fab. We'll let you know as soon as they're back."  But in another e-mail I just discovered from April 16, it said "We've sent the panel containing your boards to the fabricator. We expect to get them back around April 29th." So hopefully tomorrow I'll get some good news and they're on their way.

Meanwhile I've been working on some other really cool new ideas, plus working to move Echo Base forward. Nothing major to report yet.

Stay tuned!

PBC boards ordered!

I just placed an order for a test batch of PCB boards with OSH Park for the Feral IR Sensor project! In a couple of weeks, we'll test this board with the components to see if everything runs as planned. 

Huge thanks to Dustin Westaby who designed this board - it really is a nice work of art.  This project would still be languishing under hours of frustration and endless Hot Pockets if it weren't for his expertise.  Thanks Dustin!

BUSY

Not much to report other than Dustin and I have been very busy finalizing all the tiny details with the PCB and parts for the Feral IR Sensor.  Making progress. Still on track to have these ready for TagFest. Stay tuned!

Progress!

A couple of things to announce. First of all a HUGE shout out to Dustin "thatdecade" Westaby for coming on board and help out with the Feral IR Sensor PCB design/creation. Thanks to Dustin, were moving our components toward SMD which will allow us to do more with the sensor and hopefully make these faster and in larger quantity - if needed.  I don't know how popular these devices will be, but the working designs are performing wonderfully.  I hope to have several of these on hand for TagFest this year in July.

CALL FOR HELP

Here's where I'm at.  I have everything working, all the components are picked out and everything seems to function flawlessly.  My next step is to design and fabricate some PCB boards.  And this is where I need help.  I'm not too sure what I'm doing in this step and I'd like to have someone else with more experience design and ready all of the necessary PCB files.  The board needs to be very small, about 1.25 inches by .5 inch and include these parts...

Range Test

While I was play testing the Feral IR Sensor, I decided to do some range testing.  The LTTO gear gets about 300 feet in daylight.  The Feral IR sensor was registering hits as far away as 660 feet - from a Deluxe!  Not bad.  However this was not in full sun but in the shade - which will improve the range.  I'd like to do another test to see what the effect of full sunlight has on the sensor.