Kyle Anderson » LaserTag

Next Piece: Armband

Kyle Anderson — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 06:34:04 +0000

We were thinking it would be cool to have the LCD display be on the arm, instead of the side of the gun.

So we have modified roller-blading wrist-guards for the purpose:

Karl’s Mom helped with the sewing. Next we’ll add buttons for mode and backlight. I think they will be very thin and unobtrusive.

Our First Real Gun

Kyle Anderson — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 06:26:25 +0000

Here it is, the big milestone: our first real gun!

From this:

To this!

You can see how we have gutted an air-soft gun, and inserted our led’s and switches to turn it into a lasertag gun. All of our guns will be interchangeable as they will all have the same Cat-5 Pinout. Eventually we will have an array of guns and we can change their properties in software. (Reload times, shots per clip, damage per shot, etc..)

Prototype #1

Kyle Anderson — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 15:33:53 +0000

Here are some pictures and some short video of our first prototype gun!

A more or less finished backpack.

2×4 Gun and LCD wristband!

I love having good tools, and this $40 soldering iron is the best $40 I ever spent.

Nicd battery pack! With velcro!

And Kyle explains it all! Sort of…

Lasertag Camo

Kyle Anderson — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 23:10:34 +0000

Karl and I have taken our backpacks and spraypainted them camo! And we have installed a few components for two test boxes. (Radio, Mainboard, and ISD)

You can see me wiring the usb port for the usb key thing. (It stores your personal stats)

More to come as we prototype our first two boxes!

Ahoy! Holes!

Kyle Anderson — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 01:52:41 +0000

The next step in our Lasertag construction project is the preperation of the boxes for our components. We have decided to put all of the electronics in a backpack. But the backpack will need some I/O. We need a rj-45 for the gun, two for the arm-band, a usb for the key, and a hole for the power switch and power plug. How do we do it? We need square holes…
Well, the best and nicest way I can think to do it is to use a little thing called a roto-zip bit. I bought 5 of them at Home Depot for a few dollars. Luckily Karl has a drill press:

The pictures mostly speak for themselves. Basically we used a cardstock template:

Then spraypainted the negative:

And Routed!

We will have to use a flat file to make some holes perfect:

But the USB port worked great (It actually looks better in real life)!

I can’t think of a better way to do this in plastic. And the results are nice, with patience and hard work. We have done 10 boxes like this.

All thanks to this one bit:

Who needs a CNC machine when you have steady hands Karl? (Video)

Myspace Friend Maps

Kyle Anderson — Mon, 22 May 2006 21:54:02 +0000

Ok, I have a seceret: I am a Myspace sellout. Everyone around me was like ooh yea, check out my myspace! Or Ooo, your myspace is sooo cool. Or, Wow, your myspace cures cancer. Well, so I made one, and added friends. I soon realized that Myspace.com is interesting. (Although it sucks too. Ads everywhere, people’s pages are often littered with cpu sucking garbage and animated gifs and crappy css.)

But the Myspace chain bullitens or picture comments are not what makes Myspace.com interesting. Its is the social network map that is what is interesting. But how can I see the big picture? And what does it look like? In my search on how to do this, I came across Ben Discoe’s website and read about his work with a similar website: friendster. I decided on a similar approach.

First, because I do not have direct access to Myspace.com’s database of friends, I would have to create my own local database, and then write a spider to crawl around and populate it. So I did. I wrote it in what I know best, are you ready people: bash scripting. You can look at it for yourself in the download below, its called myspace.robot. Basically it parses a myspace profile, grabs friends, pictures, music, interests, as much information that can be harvested, and then inserts it into the database. This robot is called by other scripts that say oh, pick a random profile. Or I have a robot caller that calls in a tree like fashion, starting at a given place and traversing so many levels (myspace.tree).

Once I have the information (friends in particular). We can use this information to create a map. At first I used imagemagick to generate an image. It sucked.

It took me a while to find graphviz.

Graphviz is the perfect tool for the job. I feed it the nodes, and weights between nodes. It calculated the best positions to put the nodes. It is very configurable, including different ploting algorithms, graph styles, and output formats. It take all of this and put it into a php-mysql interface for others to input their graph-making requests. My server on the backend takes the top one on the queue, grabs the appropriate profiles, creates the friend-map, then sends an email to let the user know that the map is ready!

A simple map that includes you and your friends turns out to be pretty large. If you want to go any deeper than that you have to use svg. (bitmaps turn very large.) But how does the program know where to put each friend, realative to the other friends in the map? Answer: It uses the “howgoodofafriendareyou” metric. The more friends you have in common with another person, the better a friend you are.
I’ll have the link up in a while for the interface for others to make their own maps. You might be interested to see who myspace thinks their closest friend is.

LaserTag!

Kyle Anderson — Mon, 22 May 2006 21:39:16 +0000

My friends and I are currently constructing our own lasertag guns using this as a base.

Here is our checklist:

Construct electronic components using the above milestag components.
Get and modify vests to hold components
Melt aluminum and pour guns into molds! Rock on!
Connect it all together and play!

We’ve go the electronics together. The vests are on their way via UPS, and my friend Karl and I have the furnace ready and we can melt aluminum! We still need to put sensors on the vests, pour the guns, and interface it all together. But man, what an adventure!