Advertised setup:
- 4 weapons in each blaster with different sounds/damage amounts
- 4 teams, no friendly fire
- Single sensor, facing forward
They came in today, and it really looks like this is a heavily cost-reduced version of another product, whether it was Lightstrike or something else. There's a transparent piece on the top side of the blaster where they could have put additional sensors, and a floating piece on the back of the top with a fake display that was probably originally supposed to be a real LCD.
They don't exactly promise much, but they do deliver on the features they talk about, and there's also a rumble motor that gets used when firing and I assume when you get hit that they don't mention on the Amazon listing.
Now, onto the juicy protocol details!
Despite looking suspiciously like a Lightstrike recase, it's got an incompatible protocol.
Probably a bit hard to see in there, but it looks like there's five different time increments involved in this protocol. There's a ~1.65ms SYNC pulse, and then different long and short pulses for the active and inactive side of each cycle after that. It looks like both the active and inactive sides are used for data.
SYNC: 1.65ms
Inactive short: 0.33ms
Inactive long: 0.73ms
Active short: 0.45ms
Active long: 0.85ms
I don't actually know what the tolerance of these signals is, so I'm just cutting it off at hundredths of milliseconds after averaging a bunch of the various timings I see in the signals I captured.
I'm going to assume that both of the "shorts" are 0s, and both of the "longs" are 1s.
So decoding the various shots this way, you get...
Blue team, pistol: SYNC/00000000 10101010 00000001 00000001 00000110
Blue team, shotgun: SYNC/00000000 10101010 00000001 00000010 00000111
Blue team, submachine gun: SYNC/00000000 10101010 00000001 00000010 00000111
Blue team, missile launcher: SYNC/00000000 10101010 00000001 00000011 00001000
Green team, pistol: SYNC/00000000 10101010 00000011 00000001 00001000
Red team, pistol: SYNC/00000000 10101010 00000010 00000001 00000111
White team, pistol: SYNC/00000000 10101010 00000100 00000001 00001001
I didn't do an exhaustive capture of every combination, but I think this is enough to pull out the pattern.
The 5th byte looks like a checksum. 3rd and 4th bytes added together plus 0x04 looks to match these examples. The 1st and 2nd bytes are probably just extra syncing stuff, though it's odd that they don't have any examples of the active long pulse in there for clock adjustment. 3rd byte looks to be team, 4th byte looks to be weapon type.
Seems simple enough. The high nibble of the 3rd and 4th bytes could hide more features, but I'm going to guess at the moment that they don't. Maybe at some point I'll poke at it some, and see if I can generate some oddball signatures to throw at it.
