Digging deeper (Recoil: Part 4)

So in the previous IR digging, I decided upon a decoding scheme(Short bits are less than 0.575ms, and are "0"s, long bits are longer than 0.575ms and are "1"s). So let's go through all these captures and see what we find.

Pistol, single shot

<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00000010000111000000000000001100001<6.865ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00000010000111000000000000001100001<10.87ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>110010000111000000000000001000011<13.84ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>110010000111000000000000001000011
<END>

Huh, so there's actually multiple packet lengths. Hadn't noticed that before. I'll have to keep an eye on that.

Pistol, trigger held

<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00111000011100000000000000100000000<12.86ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00111000011100000000000000100000000<60.9ms delay>
<END?>
<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>100110000111000000000000001100100<22.87ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>100110000111000000000000001100100<26.9ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00001000000111000000000000001110000<21.87ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00001000000111000000000000001110000<47.89ms delay>
<END?>
<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>111000000111000000000000001001100<24.89ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>111000000111000000000000001001100<11.89ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00100000000111000000000000001001001<19.87ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00100000000111000000000000001001001<46.95ms delay>
<END?>
<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>100000000001110000000000000011111<13.09ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>100000000001110000000000000011111<55.98ms delay>
<END?>
<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00000010000111000000000000001100001<12.89ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>00000010000111000000000000001100001<23.9ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>110010000111000000000000001000011<15.87ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>110010000111000000000000001000011<62.93ms delay>
<END?>

(Note for myself, this only gets up to 2500ms into the capture, so I can come back and get more if I need to later)

Grenade, button held

This is pairing mode. Probably going to be the same set of packets over and over again, since the grenade has no receivers.

<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<28.44ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<46.01ms delay>
<Stray 54us pulse><32.74ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<28.43ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<28.45ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<28.43ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<28.45ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<30.04ms delay>
<Stray 0.1827ms pulse><0.3892ms delay><Stray 77us pulse><18.23ms delay><Stray 0.1823 pulse><29.68ms delay>
<END>

The grenade repeats the same packet forever in pairing mode, it looks like. It looks like it sends the packet 16 times, with a ~28ms delay between packets, and then stops transmitting for half a second, then begins the cycle again. The transmitting time total is ~776ms, and then it waits for ~480ms.

I also wonder about the noise I seem to be seeing. It looks like it's always in the fourth and twelfth packets in a burst. This could be either the AGC in the three-pin receiver I'm listening with, or it could be a glitch in the grenade itself, but it's /very/ regular.

I should capture another one of these and see if it still happens, and if the packet it sends changes between pairing instances.

Grenade, firing after countdown

<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.43ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<78.79ms delay>
<END?>
<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.43ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.43ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.43ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<78.8ms delay>
<END?>
<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.43ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.43ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.43ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<28.46ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1100000000000010000100111100111<78.8ms delay>
<END?>

It seems to repeat this 7-signature burst and delay cycle for ~22s, then it switches to a constant stream of signatures for another 10s. The constant stream is the same signature, just with only ~28.5ms delays, no ~79ms delays.

Grenade, turned off early

<START>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1110010000001000010011110000001<29ms delay>
<NOISY PACKET><30.54ms delay>
<SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1110010000001000010011110000001<28.5ms delay>
<END>

It basically just repeats the packet with a 28.5ms delay between them for 2.5s. Possibly an "unpair" command?

The grenade also sends the longest long bits I've seen, at 1.088ms. Possibly need to revise the maximum allowed length up to 1.1ms...

Contrast and compare...

Blaster shots seem to consist of two signatures, adding up to a total of 68 bits of data... Possibly only the 35-bit signatures are shots, and the 33-bit signatures are a general "data" packet? I don't see any 35-bit signatures that start with anything other than two 0 bits, and I don't see any 33-bit signatures that don't start with a 1... So let's take another pass at this data and see what patterns come out from these observations.

Well, just putting the bit patterns into notepad and removing all the duplicates, I realize that both the grenade being turned off early and the grenade "firing" both send 31-bit packets, so there's a third packet length to consider.

I'm gonna go capture another set from the grenade and see what if anything changes, and what stays the same.

More captures from the grenade

I took another set of captures in this order: Pair, fire, turn off early. Let's see what the data is.

Pairing: <START><SYNC><SYNC DELAY>101000010000001000010011110000100<delay><END>
Firing:  <START><SYNC><SYNC DELAY>110000000000100000010011110010000<delay><END>
Off:      <START><SYNC><SYNC DELAY>1110010000001000010011110000001<delay><END>

So the pairing and off-early packets are the same, but the shot packet is different... Alright... I really wish I had a second grenade here, to see if the pairing/off-early packets are the same between grenades, or unique...

.........WAAAAAIT A SECOND... That grenade shot packet is a different length from the previous one! The heck..? Now I need to capture a couple more of these...

But for now, I'm going to go get lunch, and let the confusion simmer for a bit. Maybe I'll have some insight into what might be going on.

Would you like to play a game? (Recoil: Part 3)

Boot the hub, install the app on the coworker's phone, fiddle with it's wifi settings, connect to the hub, connect my phone to the hub...

Not a whole lot of options to setting up a game, but both devices join and get into the game easily. The countdown to the beginning of the game is /way/ out of sync between the two devices, but once in-game the time seems to catch up... The Indoor Skirmish seems straightforward enough, being a free-for-all with timed respawns. It allows you to pair the grenade, but it doesn't actually do any damage. If the host exits the game, the other players get kicked out, and they get a scoreboard, but the host doesn't. In Outdoor Skirmish, the grenade seems to function as expected. There seems to be some feedback via the app when you hit other players, which is neat. The back button is supposedly a voice chat button, and it makes a chirp when you press it, but I can't actually hear anything coming out of either device when I talk into the other while holding the button down.

After running around outside with it for a while, the only notable weirdness we ran into was that the voice chat thing never seemed to work. We brought in a third device, and all three of them just gave static on the other devices. When you get close to the edge of WiFi range(Which is actually surprisingly hard to do, we were a good 300-400 feet away from it in a straight shot), it warns you to return to the area. If you don't and actually manage to leave WiFi range, it will pop up and say you're disconnected from the hub, and to check your wifi connection and get closer to the hub. At this point, I did have to reconnect to the hub's wifi network manually, but once I did, it put me right back into the game. While in the "edge of connectivity" and "disconnected" states, you don't appear to be able to take damage. We didn't check whether you could still give damage, but I would assume(Or hope, at least) not...

We did play with the grenade while outside, too. It's... Rather underwhelming. It does the ten second countdown, and then does a single burst of damage(About a segment and a half  of the health bar?), and... That's it. It's still blatting out a /ton/ of IR, but you don't take any more damage from it for the rest of it's 45-second firing spree.

None of the devices we played with had an accurate compass in the game. We would have to move opposite to the way it told us to get to the respawn zones. This is... Kinda annoying, because so much of what Recoil has to offer needs you to be able to navigate to an invisible point in the real world. There's ammo boxes, health boxes, special ammo types, extra armor, airstrikes, and probably other powerups scattered around the world, but if the game can't guide you to them easily, you're just going to get frustrated with it. When you're "killed" in an outdoor game, you need to find your way to a respawn zone, and it gives you a compass arrow and a range. If the compass arrow is useless, you're left with a range, and both of us had to wander back and forth a bit to figure out which direction we needed to go.

Perhaps the coolest feature we found, though, is that even if you miss a player, if you're aiming in their direction, they'll hear shots whizzing past them from their phone.

All in all, we're pretty impressed with what the system has to offer so far. There's a few issues that need worked out, but for as short a period as we've been testing it, and how thoroughly thought out everything's been so far, there's a pretty good chance they'll manage to fix the rest(Well... Except the no-functionality-without-a-phone bit... That's something that can't really be worked around, at this point.).

Waiting for a device, digging into the IR (Recoil: Part 2)

Well, none of the devices I have available to me at work are new enough to run the Recoil app, so digging into the gameplay will have to wait until tomorrow. Instead, I'll dig into the IR protocol a bit, and see what info can be gleaned from it.

The setup

I have a Saleae Logic that works great for things like this, and a little IR receiver gadget that's not much more than a 38KHz 3-pin IR receiver, a resistor, an LED, and a battery pack. So by connecting the Logic to the IR receiver's output, and the battery pack's ground, I have a nice little visual indication on whether I'm receiving anything at all, and the Logic captures it to my PC for analysis.

So let's grab some signals!

Capturing 

Thanks to having had the IR gadget on earlier, I already know the various ways to get things to send IR. There's a whole five captures I need to do: Grenade with countdown, turning the grenade off early, holding down the grenade button, a single shot from the blaster, and holding down the trigger on the blaster. A few minutes of setup and renaming files, and that's done. So what do we have?

What it looks like

What I believe to be the basic unit of data in the Recoil IR protocol

Keep in mind that 3-pin IR receivers tend to be active low, so the signal goes down towards the bottom when signal is present, and back to the top when there isn't. So, right off the bat, we have a nice long SYNC pulse(3.3ms), and then a delay(1.5ms), and then a bunch of data. Data looks to be encoded in both the high and low states, so you'll need to be able to capture times on both edges.

You'll also note that I captured two "packets" in a row, and that these are identical "packets". Everything that's sent from the blaster seems to be sent like this, probably for error checking purposes. The grenade seems to send the same packet over and over and over.

Now, back to the encoding. It looks like there's a "short" and a "long" bit, with short bits being (very) roughly 0.4ms, and long bits being 0.8ms. Tolerances are /very/ wide on these timings, with anything from 0.276ms to 0.927ms being seen.

I'm arbitrarily setting the threshold between a "short" and a "long" bit at 0.575ms, a minimum valid period of 0.25ms, and a maximum valid data bit period of 1ms.

I'm also arbitrarily saying that a "short" bit is a 0, and a "long" bit is a 1.

So the packet shown in the screenshot above would decode as 00000010000111000000000000001100001, or 00000010 00011100 00000000 00001100 001. This seems a bit weird, that it's 35 bits... But for now, I have no better ideas on how to decode it, so I'll stick with a 35-bit packet for now.

For the moment, a coworker lent me their phone for the purposes of trying out the actual gameplay, so let's switch gears again!

Another day, another tag system (Recoil: Part 1)

It's been a while since I've done a laser tag post! There's a new contender on the block, and it's time to run it through it's paces! This time, I've got the Recoil Multi-Player Starter Set in-hand.

The Recoil Multi-Player Starter Set box

The things inside the box

The right side of the RK-45 SPITFIRE Recoil Weapon

The left side of the RK-45 SPITFIRE Recoil Weapon

The front of the Wi-Fi Game Hub

The back of the Wi-Fi Game Hub

The front of the FRAG Grenade Recoil Weapon

The back of the FRAG Grenade Recoil Weapon

As I did with the Lightstrike gear, I want to do as in-depth of a look at this stuff as I can. I'm going to start with the basics(How it feels, whether it plays well), and then dive into the technical details. So let's get going!

Impressions (Before batteries)

The blasters have a good weight to them already, which has me a bit worried that they might be heavy once I actually put the batteries in. There's a whole four buttons, which is reasonable enough. A trigger, a reload, and two other buttons that I'm not actually sure what they are yet. The buttons themselves feel good, though there's no tactical feedback on when the trigger actuates. It's got several three-pin IR receivers poking through the case around the front end, so it should have a fairly decent field of vision. This blaster actually has a three glow-dot iron sight(Two red dots on the rear, one green dot on the front) on it, which is awesome. The iron sight is about as long as they could make it and still fit on the blaster, so if it's well-aligned with the optics in the blaster, it should actually be reasonably accurate.

The blaster's iron sights

The grenade is a pretty good size for throwing, and is pretty rubberized so it should survive the being thrown. It still probably wouldn't be pleasant to get hit with, though, so still be careful where you're throwing it. It's got a lot of LEDs on it, which bode well for either IR coverage or blinkiness.

The Wi-Fi Game Hub is a box with an antenna, a power button, and a battery compartment. There's also a MicroUSB B port on the side. Not a whole lot to say about it, though the built-in handle is a nice touch.

Impressions (After batteries)

As I feared, the blaster is a bit heavy now that I've put batteries in it. Specifically, it's front-heavy. You can use the... Well, it looks suspiciously like a GoPro mount, now that I look at it... You cna use the GoPro mount as a hand-rest for your opposite hand, and it still feels decent, but using it one-handed is probably going to be tiring on your wrist. The round button on the side is the power button, apparently, as it lights up green when I press it, and turns off if I hold it for a few seconds and let go. Even without pairing a phone in, the tagger appears to launch into an "active" mode, where you can pull the trigger to fire in a fully-automatic mode. There's a fairly nice recoil effect, too. Kinda noisy, but it's got a good feel to it. Turning on an IR receiver gadget, I can see that it does send an IR packet with every trigger pull. Somewhat... Questionable... Is that it also has a red LED on the front that blinks as a "muzzle flash" with every shot...

The frag grenade's button appears to have three "modes". Pressing it once turns the grenade on, and it starts blinking a 10-second countdown on the LED, and then sends a flood of IR packets out for 45 seconds. Holding the button blinks the LED off and on until you let go, and it sends IR packets for one second, then doesn't for one second, and repeats this two-second IR cycle until you let go of the button. Pressing the button to start the countdown, then pressing it again before it finishes seems to turn it off, and then it sends about three seconds worth of IR.

The Wi-Fi Game Hub seems to have a couple different button states, too. The first press turns it on, and the LED starts doing a pulsing fade-in-and-out thing. Pressing it again after that will make the LED blink on and off for a bit, then turn off. I assume this is a "safe shutdown" thing. Holding down the button while it's doing the pulsing will make it start to do a "half-pulse", where it goes between 50% and 100% brightness. The hub doesn't appear to have an IR capability.

Turning on various combinations of blasters and the grenade, none of them appear to respond to each other at all yet. So there doesn't appear to be any "simple" games that don't need an app. Though on closer inspection, I notice that there's no speaker on the blaster, so there's not really any way to give feedback for the game progress... Can't tell a person they've gotten hit when the only feedback method is the rumble/recoil motor, which is already used for firing.

Starting up the app

My phone's an LG G5, running LineageOS(Android 7.x). Starting up the app, it asks for location, SD card storage, camera, and microphone access. It asks for me to agree to an EULA, and for a nickname, then tells me to turn on the Wi-Fi Game Hub. Apparently I never waited long enough for it to finish booting up, because it says to wait 30-45 seconds for the LED to stop blinking before going on to the next step.

It then walks me through connecting to the hub, and warns me to disable cell data and that I might need to tweak other settings to get my phone to stay connected to the hub(This is a known problem with cell phones trying to connect to ad-hoc networks made by devices that don't have an internet connection, so nothing unexpected, just unfortunate).

It then asks me what kind of blaster I want to use, and then turns on Bluetooth and connects to it.

I wander through the menus for a bit, and there's options to change your nickname, and little help things for how to use the grenade(Which tells me that the "hold button" mode I found earlier is for claiming the grenade by a player during the game).

I hit the "Battle" option, which then starts a firmware update on the hub, and tells me to restart it by pushing the button, waiting for the blinking to stop, then push the button again to turn it back on and wait for the pulsing to stop. This goes well, and my phone automatically reconnects to the hub.

There's a few game types available currently, split into "Indoor" and "Outdoor", with the note that outdoor games require GPS. I'll get to the outdoor stuff later, for now I just want to see what Indoor does, so I pick the only Indoor option currently available, "Skirmish". It then asks me how long of a game I want, with a default of 2 minutes, and a score limit, which defaults to unlimited. It then drops me into a lobby, and I remember that the hub has no IR functionality, and there doesn't seem to be a way to use a blaster with no device paired to it... So I go start digging for another device to use with the other blaster...

And the work devices need to charge, so I'm gonna have to take a break here while that happens.

Current impressions

That there doesn't seem to be ANY no-device functionality, the build quality seems pretty good, and the hints I'm getting from what I've seen seem to imply that things were well thought through before implementation. Impressions of the app are minimal yet.

Random Blaster from Amazon

Last week sometime, Jammer found an Amazon listing for a blaster by Simply Addictive Games, that they're calling CALL OF LIFE. It looked suspiciously similar to the Lightstrike gear of days-gone-by, and I bought a pair of them to sate my curiosity.

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.

Back to Tag

I haven't posted much here lately, but things have been happening.

TagFest came and went, and with it the first public hands-on(Well, second. That one was under an informal non-disclosure agreement, though, so not exactly public.) with the shiny new LTAR.

While there, we got to play with the first 12 production-model LTARs off the production line. It was a blast.

While others have already posted their thoughts on this tagger before, I'd like to put mine out there as another set of datapoints.

Light Strike Technicalities, Part 2 - ITS

So yeah. Picked up some ITSs a few days ago, and finally got around to capturing the signals they send out. Let's get to it.

Mode	Decoded signal
ITS, Blue team, Sentry mode	00000111000000000000111100001000
ITS, Red team, Sentry mode	00000100000000000000111100001000
ITS, Yellow team, Sentry mode	00000101000000000000111100001000
ITS, Green team, Sentry mode	00000110000000000000111100001000

Not much interesting going on in Sentry mode.

Mode	Decoded signal
ITS, Blue team, Bomb mode	00000111000000010000111000011000
	00000111000000100000111000011000
ITS, Red team, Bomb mode	00000100000000110000111000011000
ITS, Blue team, Bomb mode	00000111000001000000111000011000
	00000111000001010000111000011000
	00000111000001100000111000011000
	00000111000010000000111000011000
	00000111000010010000111000011000
	00000111000010100000111000011000
	00000111000010110000111000011000
	00000111000011000000111000011000
	00000111000011010000111000011000
	00000111000011100000111000011000
	00000111000011110000111000011000
	00000111000100000000111000011000

There's something interesting going on with Bomb mode that I don't understand.
Look closely. It's counting how many times it's been activated.
There's no way to see this on the tagger. It's a previously unused section of the shot signal. It doesn't reset when a different team activates it. What were they planning with this? I can't come up with anything...

Mode	Decoded signal
ITS, Blue team, Medic mode	000001110000000000000110000000100<SYNC>00001000000000000000100000000111
	000001110000000000000110000000100<SYNC>00001000000000000000100000000111
ITS, Red team, Medic mode	000001000000000000000110000000100<SYNC>00001000000000000000100000000100

Here's another interesting one. The part before the <SYNC> is the shot that activates the medic. The part after is the medic's response.
Look closely at it. Here, I'll even copy it around for you so you can see it easier...

Red team, Laser Strike	000001000000000000000110000000100
ITS, Red team, Medic mode	00001000000000000000100000000100

That's right. The medic's response is one bit shorter. I captured it a couple times to make sure.

I can tell that the last part of the medic response is the team that it's healing. The rest of it's a mystery, as it doesn't match the rest of the stuff I've seen.

I'm curious to poke around with some of those unused high-end bits, now. If setting the bit that the medic uses up there can let the tagger recognize a shorter packet, I wonder what else is hidden up there...

Light Strike: A Breakdown, Part 2

So it turns out that I ended up getting some of the other Light Strike accessories. While cleaning out the local stores of the targets(We figured that at $4, the parts in them would probably make them good for mod fodder), we saw the "Intelligent Targeting System" for a whole $4.50 and picked up a pair of them. These will probably become something interesting down the road, though they're going to be fun building a new board for... These things are crazy on the inside.

But anyways. This device is intended to add some variety to the gameplay. It can be set to one of three modes, Sentry, Bomb, or Medic.

Each of these modes starts out about the same. You pick the mode with a three-position switch, and turn the device on with another. At this point, the device is on in the mode you picked. If any one team shoots the device five times in succession, it becomes captured for whichever team shot it those fives times, with varying effects depending on the mode.

In medic mode, after you capture it, every time you shoot it after that will cause any teammates in the device's cone of fire to gain health. In bomb mode, shooting it after you've captured it will, after a short countdown to "arm" the bomb, cause the device to spin and shoot anybody that is not on the team that has captured it for a short time. In sentry mode, after you have shot it the fifth time, it will start spinning and shooting at anybody not on the team that captured it. Any opposing team can shoot it four times to make it neutral again, and then shoot it another five times to capture it for their team.

In addition to the mode and power switches, there's a volume switch, a rotation speed switch, and a button. The two switches should be rather self-explanatory, and the button lets you choose whether the device is always rotating, or only in the cases mentioned before.

All in all, this is a neat little device. It'd be neat to have the sentry mode set up in your base from the get-go, guarding a flag... Though I think at that point, it would devolve into more of a "Flush out the people keeping the sentry active" than anything else... This might get turned into a sentry for LTTO, once the new gear comes out, since they're bringing back IFF beacons(And with a vengeance this time!)...

I'll probably have info on the signals it sends later.

Battle Tag, In Memoriam

Battle Tag was brought up in a recent conversation, so I figured I would write up what I liked and didn't like about it, as I did with Light Strike, before I forget everything about it. I've never owned any of this gear, but I did sit down with it for a few hours last year, long enough to run it through it's paces.

Battle Tag was yet another newcomer's foray into laser tag, this time by Ubisoft. Announced at E3 in 2010, this system was billed as more of a "shooter come to life" than a laser tag system, but most of us saw it for what it was.

The base Battle Tag set included two taggers(Called "T-Blasters"), two sensor vests, two ammo packs, two "bases", a "UbiConnect", and an installation CD.

Design

The actual design of these taggers is quite good. The blasters feel good in your hand, and don't feel like they're going to break. The sensor vests are comfortable, though I question where they had the wire come out to attach to the blaster. The connection between the vest and the tagger did seem a bit flimsy, and I seem to remember hearing that it was easy to break that connector.

Tagger Details

As I remember it, there were two major buttons on the tagger, a trigger and a button on the back that cycles your display through it's different displays. There is a third one on the bottom of the barrel, but that's not intended to be pressed by hand. As I said before, this tagger feels good in your hand, and it looks rather good, too. There is a display on the rear, which shows your health and remaining ammo by default, if I remember correctly.

The display is rather clunky, as it relies on a few icons to tell you what it's displaying, rather than text. It took me a while to figure out what it was actually displaying, and even then it was not easy to just glance down at it and see what it was showing me.

These taggers also look to have been designed to be expandable, though no expansions were actually released or advertised. The black "shell" of the tagger comes off(Push it forward), revealing a... 6-pin, I believe it was, port. I didn't own the gear I was experimenting with, so I didn't feel comfortable putting an oscilloscope on it to see what was there, but my guess is that this was intended for expansions down the road.

Sensor Vest Details

There is no sensor on the gun, unless I'm not remembering correctly. This system is reliant upon an external sensor vest, which connects to the bottom of the tagger. The computer will remind you to plug in the vest if you try to start a game without it plugged in, and will not let you start the game until all the vests are plugged in. This is a nice feature, and it shows that they were thinking in the right direction of doing their best to prevent cheating.

These sensor vests are comfortable. A lot of different people were trying them out when I was playing with them, and I don't think it didn't fit on anybody. I don't have a good picture of it handy, but it goes "around" one arm, across the back, and over the other shoulder and snaps back into itself. The vest felt secure, and didn't limit my range of motion very much, if at all.

These vests also give a decent amount of feedback to the person shooting you, as well. Each of the...four, I think, sensors has red lights in it that light up when you get hit. I don't remember if it was just the sensor that got hit that lit up, or all of them, but the lighting up was easy to see, and it was quite nice to know when you were actually hitting somebody.

Unfortunately, the actual sensors on this vest are rather disappointing. While they have very good coverage, and you can take a hit from almost any direction, the range at which you can take a hit is dismal. In the shade, you can get 100-200 feet, depending on how well you can aim(Did I mention that the taggers don't have any sights?). Step out into the sun, however, and you're lucky to take a hit from 20 feet. This might have been a fluke, but it did not bode well, to me.

Ammo Packs and Bases

These are some of my favorite features of this system. Included in the starter set is two "Ammo Pack"s and two "Base"s. Your tagger can only carry a limited amount of ammo, which I believe was configurable. After that runs out, you have to find an ammo pack, and swipe it across a button on the bottom of the barrel on the tagger. The taggers include an RFID reader behind that button, and the ammo packs have an RFID tag in them. Swiping the ammo pack refills your ammo, and if I remember correctly, you can set it up so that you have to alternate between different ammo packs, or you can only use each one once. This feature is REALLY cool, in my opinion.

The Base works much the same way as the Ammo Pack, except I don't remember what they do. Sorry, this is the problem with doing a review almost a year after having played with the gear. :)

Software and UbiConnect

These taggers are designed to be used with a computer. So much so that they're useless without one. Included in the starter set is a ring-shaped "UbiConnect", which connects to your computer via a USB port. This is a radio transceiver, and each tagger communicates with it constantly throughout the game. This is one of the biggest limitations of this system, as you have to stay in range of the UbiConnect throughout the entirety of the game. If you wander out of range, you've got approximately 5 seconds to get back in range before it drops your tagger from the game with no way back in. And the range is not very large(Approximately 200 feet, if I remember correctly), especially for people like me, who are used to wandering far and wide to come up behind people and catch them unaware.

That said, the software is rather nice. You can assign a name to each tagger, and configure how much health and ammo you have, and there are several different game types included. During the game, the computer/software plays a steady stream of audio clips telling you things about the game(Including telling players that haven't shot or been shot lately to get moving, which I found great), and shows the current score on the screen, as well as an event log of who's shot who, and who's used the ammo pack/bases lately. All in all, the software's pretty neat, and rather pretty while it's doing it.

There is one other problem with the software or the UbiConnect(I'm not sure which one is the limitation). You're limited to 8 players per game. I'm not sure how many teams it handled, but there was a hard limit of 8 players total per game. Compared to LTTO's hosted-game limit of 24 players, and almost any system's non-hosted unlimited players, this is quite a small game.
Behind the scenes, if you dig into the software a bit, you find that each game mode is controlled by a lua script that looks to get uploaded to each tagger. Unfortunately, it looks abstracted enough that there's not a whole lot that you can do, and the actual scoring is handled by something that I didn't find while I was looking. But still, it's rather neat that they're uploading a script to the gun which actually controls how it works during that particular game.

Final summary

Things I liked:

• Real-time scoreboard
• Computer connectivity
• Ammo packs/bases
• Being able to take a hit from any direction
• Good feedback when you hit somebody

Things I didn't like:

• Tagging range
• The display on the tagger
• Very little leeway in going out of range of the UbiConnect
• Having to stay in range of the UbiConnect
• 8 player limit

Similar to Light Strike, this system had some neat ideas, but had enough problems in it's implementation that it just wasn't feasible for the majority of people that are really interested in playing laser tag. I loved the computer connectivity for setting up and scoring games. I didn't like how it dropped you from the game if you strayed out of range for more than a few seconds. In a system like this, there's no reason why the tagger could not be functional, if even only at a basic level(Say, sending and receiving tags. Need to use an ammo pack? Head back to radio range.), when out of range of the UbiConnect. I can see that they wanted the real-time scoreboard, but it would not have been hard to buffer the major events into the tagger's memory and transmit them later when it comes back into range. Somewhat more complicated, yes, but in my opinion, they would have had a much better product for only being slightly more expensive.

This system seems to have met it's demise already, though it never really made it fully to market. They did a "soft launch" in a few test markets as well as online, and it never made it farther than that. Their forums and website have gone down, and it is no longer available in their online store.

This is another system I would have liked to see do well. We really do need more competition in the laser tag market, and UbiSoft had some good, new ideas with this system. They just fell a bit short of the mark, unfortunately.

Light Strike Technicalities

Since I have the Light Strike gear, I decided to do some poking around with the signals it sends. Using the OpenBench Logic Sniffer, a 38kHz IR receiver, and a 5V power supply, I captured most of the combinations of team and weapon. What follows is a dump of my notes while I was at it.

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Seems to use the off time for data, rather than the on time, as all "on" pulses other than the initial sync one are the same length(880uS).
I'm guessing that the 880uS off-times represent a 0, and the 3300uS off-times represent a 1. Seems like an odd rate to be sending stuff at...
Has a 6780uS "sync" pulse at the start, launches immediately into data.
Looks to be capable of carrying 32 bits of data.

Going by the above guesses, "default" shot(Blue team, Laser Strike) decodes to 0b00000111000000000000010100000010, in the order it's transmitted in.

Decodes following above guesses.
Orange rifle:

Team/weapon	Data
Blue team, Laser Strike	00000111000000000000010100000010
Blue team, Stealth Strike	00000111000000000000011000000010
Blue team, Pulse Strike	00000111000000000000011100000011
Blue team, Rail Strike	00000111000000000000100000000110
Blue team, Sonic Strike	00000111000000000000100100001000
Red team, Laser Strike	00000100000000000000010100000010
Red team, Stealth Strike	00000100000000000000011000000010
Red team, Pulse Strike	00000100000000000000011100000011
Red team, Rail Strike	00000100000000000000100000000110
Red team, Sonic Strike	00000100000000000000100100001000
Yellow team, Laser Strike	00000101000000000000010100000010
Yellow team, Stealth Strike	00000101000000000000011000000010
Yellow team, Pulse Strike	00000101000000000000011100000011
Yellow team, Rail Strike	00000101000000000000100000000110
Yellow team, Sonic Strike	00000101000000000000100100001000
Green team, Laser Strike	00000110000000000000010100000010

Though not completed decoding all team/shot combinations, I'm fairly certain that bits 7 and 8(Starting at 1, on the left) are the team, 21-24 are the weapon ID(Or something related to the weapon used), and bits 29-32 are the weapon damage or something else related to the weapon used.

29-32 does not make sense as a weapon ID, as both the Laser Strike and the Stealth Strike would have the same ID.
Seems rather strange to have two different weapons do the same damage, though... Maybe the stealth strike takes more ammo instead, to balance it out?

I'm guessing bits 1-6 are something related to what "type" of thing is sending the signal. All of my shots seem to be 0b000001 in those spots. Actually, let me grab the other style...

Yellow rifle:

Team/weapon	Data
Blue team, Laser Strike	00000111000000000000010100000010

Nope. Doesn't identify which tagger sent it. Could still differentiate between pistol/rifle, though. Don't have any pistols to test this.

Might pick up some of the accessories at some point to look at those signals. There's still a lot of bits unaccounted for.

---

All in all, they looked to be planning quite a ways ahead with their protocol. A good chunk of the data it's sending isn't accounted for in the shot signals, so there's probably a lot of capabilities hidden away. This further reinforces my thought that WowWee could have been a real competitor, had they put a better sensor setup on their tagger.

Light Strike: A Breakdown

NOTE: My camera seems to have gone missing, so there's no pictures in here. I'll go back and add them when I can...

I picked up a pair of Light Strike rifles this week on clearance, the orange one(G.A.R.-023) and the yellow one(S.R.-143). Though it may be on it's way out, now, I would like to go through this gear feature-by-feature, in an attempt to set the record straight, as I've heard a lot of conflicting stuff about this gear.

Light Strike was designed and built by WowWee Group Limited, who also made the PaperJamz line of paper/plastic guitars. These laser tag units quite obviously follow the same paper/plastic design.

To give a bit of my background, and to show what bias I might have, I have been playing with Hasbro/STM's LTTO line for... 6 or 7 years now, I think. I love most of the many features the LTTO line offers, and that gear has set my standard for both outdoor range and features.

//Put picture of both rifles and sensors here

Impressions of the Light Strike rifles (before batteries)

• This stuff is built well. While obviously plastic-looking, they are quite solid-feeling, with very little flex or give anywhere.

• The accessory slot covers look to be well-designed, and don't feel like they're going to snap off or get stuck.

• The battery cover is a bit difficult, as if you don't make sure it's straight, it is entirely possible to tighten down one screw and not be able to screw in the other one.

Ergonomics

• Orange rifle: While obviously designed for smaller hands than mine, this rifle is quite comfortable. It also has a nice weight to it. Though not exactly "heavy", it not really light, either. I haven't actually been running around with this, but having fiddled with it for a few hours, I didn't notice anything particularly uncomfortable about the design.

• Yellow rifle: After only a few minutes of playing with this one, the bumps on the back of the grip were digging into my hand. I didn't spend much time with this rifle, as the grip hurt enough that I wouldn't want to use it for more than a few minutes. //Put picture of yellow handle here

Now, before I get much farther, I should note that there are three different pistols and three different rifles in the Light Strike lineup, one pistol and one rifle of each of three colors(red, orange and yellow). Most of my experience with this gear is with the orange rifle, but so far as I can tell, all the functionality is the same between the three varieties of rifle, just the button layout and sounds are different.

Buttons and switches

As I said before, there's three rifles in the lineup, each with it's own sounds and button layouts. The actual buttons are the same, they're just in different spots. Each rifle has a power switch, a trigger, a reload button, and six "touch-sensitive" buttons that control various functions.

//Picture of touch panel on both

As you can see, there is a "shield" button, a "weapon select" button, a "single/rapid" button, a "volume" button, a "team" button, and "fingerprint"/"I.D. Scanner" button. I'll go through these one by one.

Shield

The shields on these units is quite a bit different, compared to what I'm used to from the LTTO line. These shields, you press the button once, and for the next 15 seconds or so, you take half damage from enemy fire. After those 15 seconds are up, your shields turn off and take about 3 minutes to regenerate before you can use them again. You cannot turn your shields off early, but you can still shoot while your shields are on, so this isn't really a problem, unless you think you might need your shields again fairly soon.

While this is quite a bit different from what I'm used to, I do like the way it works. You're not completely immune, but you're not helpless, either.

Weapon Select

One of my favorite features of this line, is the fact that each tagger functions as not one, but five different weapons. Pressing this button will cycle you through five different weapons, each one having unique sounds, refire rate, damage amounts, ammo usage, and some of them do not allow switching between "semi-auto" and "single fire" modes(Which is covered in the "Single/Rapid" button section).

The five weapons are Laser Strike, Stealth Strike, Pulse Strike, Rail Strike, and Sonic Strike. I don't have any numbers for any of these, as the manual is very on details. I will take quotes from the manuals to describe these.

Laser Strike is your default weapon. It doesn't have much firepower but it blasts super fast.
Stealth Strike is similar to laser strike but its muffled blasts let you sneak up on enemies.
Pulse Strike packs more punch. It's best in semi-auto mode but uses ammo faster and has a longer delay between blasts.
Rail Strike has a ton of firepower but goes through ammo fast and has a longer delay between blasts.
Sonic Strike is the biggest weapon in your arsenal but goes through ammo quickly and has the longest delay between blasts.

All of these weapons share the same ammo bin, so you can't use up the ammo on one and then switch to another to keep shooting. I think the idea here is that all of these are energy weapons, and you're using the same battery until it runs out. Not a bad way of doing it, really.

Single/Rapid

This button is...strange, to say the least. If the weapon you have select allows it(The Rail Strike and Sonic Strike don't), this button lets you switch between "Semi-Auto" and "Single Fire" firing modes. Only these names really don't make sense. "Single Fire" is more akin to full-automatic, in that if you hold the trigger down, it will keep firing until it runs out of ammo. "Semi-Auto" is a three-round burst, followed by a delay, and this pattern repeats for as long as you hold the button down until you run out of ammo.

Ignoring this odd terminology, the button itself seems rather pointless. Your ammo bins are large enough that you can keep up full-auto("Single Fire") for about 5-6 seconds with the Laser Strike/Stealth Strike, and reloading takes about 2 seconds. I can't think of any situation where you would really need/want to slow down your firing with the "Semi-Auto"/three round burst mode.

I'm going to chalk this one up as part of the gimmick side of these.

Volume

This cycles the volume level of your tagger through three levels. Not a whole lot more to say, really. You can't turn the sound all the way off with this button, but there is also a headphone jack on the rear end of the gun which will turn off the audio to the speakers. I like the ability to use headphones with the tagger, though I question the fact that they mention doing this in the manual to "use your tagger in stealth mode"...

I can't say that LTTO doesn't fall into the same trap, though. Though the LTTO manual doesn't outright suggest using the ability to turn off the volume to hide, you can turn the sound off by holding one of the buttons. I will admit that I myself have used this to my advantage in some games, though it is typically frowned upon if/when it comes to light.

Team

//Picture of front panels with various team colors

There are four teams available in the Light Strike gear, Blue, Red, Yellow, and Green. Holding this button down for a few seconds at any point in the game will move you to the next team in the cycle, changing the color of the front several light panels to the color of your team.

No, there's no limitation on this. If I remember correctly, it was even noticed in the commercials for Light Strike that at least one player switched sides mid-game to be on the winning team in the end... While I like the method of identifying teams with the color panels, there REALLY needs to be limitations on when you can change sides. This is one place where I'm of the opinion that either everybody should be able to shoot everybody, or the teams are pre-set and once the game starts, cannot be changed.

While this could be set in place by the group that's playing's rules, I have dealt with many people who care much more about winning than they do about playing fair to trust this method of changing teams.

"Fingerprint"/"I.D. Scanner"

The thing I love about this button is that you never have to train it whose fingerprints are allowed and whose aren't. When you first turn the unit on, it will make a little powering-up noise, and then sit there cycling all the lights through various colors. If you press any button besides volume or the "Fingerprint scanner", it beeps at you and tells you "Fingerprint required". Once you press this button, your tagger is ready to go. Once your tagger is armed, you never use this button until you turn the tagger off and on again. This is entirely a gimmick button, and serves no other purpose.

Trigger, reload, power switch

There's not much to say about these, so I'll just combine them into one section.

The trigger is rather nice. You pull it back part of the way, and there is a nice resistance just before the button actually engages. The orange rifle has a much weaker resistance before that final click than the yellow rifle, but it's still there.

The reload button is a long button on the button of the tagger. The one on the yellow rifle has a bad habit of the rear-most end getting stuck pushed down due to the shape of the button and the case around it, but the orange rifle's button works well.

The power switch is on the top of the tagger. The orange rifle has it recessed at an angle in a dip in the case, and the yellow one has it sticking straight out the top of it. The orange one seems like it would be somewhat difficult to flip accidentally, and the yellow one seems stiff enough that I don't think you're likely to flip it if you did bump it.

Transmitters/Receivers

A very important part of a laser tag unit is how well it can send and receive tag signals from other taggers.

Light Strike is rather disappointing in the receiving aspect. It has only a single sensor built into the gun, and it's in the very tip of the barrel, facing forwards. Try as I might, I could not get them to take a hit from the side or rear.

As for transmitting, I don't have a particularly accurate measurement, but I would guess that I was starting to have problems hitting the other tagger at about 150 feet away, as the sun was setting behind the tagger I was shooting at.

This is not a particularly bad range, but having come from the LTTO gear which gets 300-400 feet in broad daylight, it's not a particularly good range, either.

Lights

//Picture of lit-up taggers, blue team

There are a lot of lights on these taggers. While each variety of tagger has it's own arrangement of them, they each have nine lights.

Three of them are treated as the "barrel" of the weapon, lighting up in the color of your team when idle, flashing when you shoot, and lighting up in the color of them that shot you when you get hit. These ones are blue in the picture, but as I said, change to show which team you are on.

Three of them are used to show how much ammo you have left, with a solid bar being 1/3 of a magazine/clip, and a flashing bar being somewhere between 0/3 and 1/3. These ones are always green.

The last three show your health, in the same manner as the ammo ones do. These ones are always red. When you run out of health, it plays a sound, you can no longer shoot, and your tagger starts flashing in a rainbow of colors. It's really easy to get back into the game, though. Hold the shield button down and pull the trigger, and you're back in the game. It plays a sound when you do this, but it's rather quiet. Nowhere near loud enough to let other players hear that you respawned. Both Laser Challenge and LTTO make it quite obvious when you respawn, with a very loud sound, and a 10-second audible countdown, respectively.

Sounds

There are also a lot of sounds on these taggers. There are three taggers. Each one has a different voice for it's spoken things, such as weapon names, the fact that it "recognized" your "fingerprint", when you turn your shield on, when it runs out, and when it regenerates, and the names of the two firing modes.

The actual weapon sounds are the same across the taggers, though I didn't realize it at first. The yellow rifle seems to have better audio quality, as the bass in the Rail Strike shot sound is much more noticeable. Whether intentional or not, these slight variations in sound quality did make me think for a while that each variety had unique sounds for everything. It would be neat if they did.

Accessories

The only accessories I have for these taggers is the "SOUND FX TARGET" that each rifle came with, which does nothing more than light up with the color of the team it was shot with and play a hit sound. Other than target practice, the only way I can think of to use these would be to buy a few extras for each player(They were $10 each, I think, before they went on sale? I might be wrong on that, I didn't really keep track of them.), and rig up a harness on each player. If an enemy managed to light up all of a player's targets in their color, you either join their team or are tagged out of the game. This would rely entirely on the honor system, however.

There are many other accessories for this line of taggers, but I don't think I'll be putting any more money into these, so you will have to look elsewhere for how those change the system.

I do know that there was another sensor setup that was a vest that you "paired" with your tagger, which turned off the sensor in your tagger and the vest took over the health-tracking. This might handle taking hits from the side/rear better, but there's a major problem with this: it was sold separately for $40. $50 for the rifle and another $40 for a sensor vest to be able to take hits from any direction other than straight ahead? And then you realize that you need a second pair for a second player... This system would get expensive fast.

Summary

Usable range: ~150 feet
Cheatability: Medium-High
Would I buy more: No.

Things I like, in no particular order:

1. The lights. Nice and obvious which team you're on, and it lights up which team you were just shot by. It tells you what you need to know, without being too explicit about it.
   
2. The fact that there's three varieties of rifle/pistol. While they're functionally the same, the bit of variety they add to the choice of taggers is rather nice. And you get your choice of grip styles, too.
3. The design of the orange rifle. I like the feel of the orange rifle. If I ever gut these for putting other taggers into, I'd do it with the orange rifle, not the yellow one.
4. The fact that it is expandable. Though I didn't put any money into the accessories, I like the fact that it does have the capability for it.
5. The "multiple weapons in one" idea. This is something I've been thinking about how to accomplish in my "dream laser tag" system that I've been writing down ideas for for a year or two now, and they pulled it off rather nicely.
   

Things I didn't like, in no particular order:

1. How easy it is to switch teams mid-game. I have dealt with many people trying to cheat their way out of losing fairly, and this system makes it entirely too easy for them to do it and not get caught.
2. The design of the yellow rifle. The grip is quite uncomfortable, even for short periods, to me. There are odd protrusions on it that dig into your hand that make holding the weight of the tagger hurt.
3. There only being one sensor on the front of the tagger. I come from a system that has a sensor dome on the tagger that allows almost 360-degree coverage. Only being able to take hits from the front just doesn't cut it for me.
4. The firing modes. The names don't make any sense, and there's no reason to switch between them anyways.
5. The "fingerprint" scanner. The only other thing you can do when you first turn the tagger on is change the volume. Why not just throw people straight into the game? It's not going to change much of anything except reduce your cost a little bit.
6. The layouts of the touch-sensitive buttons. I don't mind that they're different between varieties of taggers. I do mind that they're all impossible to use without looking at them. The firing mode button on the orange rifle is just above the trigger, but you can't quite bend your thumb up far enough to touch it.

Final comments:
With a few refinements, I really think WowWee could have a much better contender for the laser tag market. A better sensor setup in the tagger itself, the elimination of a few mostly useless buttons, and a better layout for the buttons, and I would have no problems seeing this as a viable step between the advanced features of the LTTO line and the bare-bones system that is Laser Challenge.

The sensor setup is the major one, to me. It shouldn't have cost more than a dollar or so to add a pair of sensors, one on either side, and it would be more than good enough as a step up from Laser Challenge.