The LTAR, the latest addition to the Lazer Tag lineup, has been a great blaster to use. Even without the iPod or iPhone attached, the blaster performs well and I personally appreciate the simplicity of it's operation. Izzy on the Lazer Tag Team Ops Yahoo! Group has been working on a display for the base LTAR blaster (no iOS cradle/device attached) that will show the user his health and other information. It's pretty impressive designing something like this for a blaster that's designed to show this data through an iOS device and this will certainly help hobbyists, like myself, who hope to recase the LTAR into other shells while still having a way to display health data to the user. See the video below on his progress on this great piece of equipment!
That is freaking AWESOME. Just what the LTAR needed! You know, if the LTAR was succesful enough, (and I might be crazy for suggesting this) I could see Hasbro making an official LTAR display (sold seperately) for, well... I mean, I could see 50$ (Beats a 100-400$ Idevice) or around 20-30$ (it is already 40$ per unit) so yeah, pretty much, hehe...
ReplyDeleteWhy did you pick 8 LED's? I know it is hard to fit 10 vertical LED's (and there is programming to consider) but why don't you do 5 like the LTX?
Also, for the countdown, I know that it is a count"down", but it kind of makes more sense for the LED's to increase from 0 instead of decrease from full. As in powering up from 0 to full health (the LTX works this way)
All in all, what you have accomplished is simply wonderful, you should be proud of the work you put into this thus far! Good job!
Actually, I just realized... The original version didn't have an LED bar at all. It had a trio of RYG LEDs, in a triangle shape, one each for health, ammo, and shields status. As you ran out of each, it would fade from green to yellow to red.
DeleteThat version had a /lot/ of problems, though, not the least of which was that the LEDs were too dim to see in sunlight.
The main reason I went with 8 vertical LED is because I didn't have room to fit 10 on there. The original idea had 9 vertical LEDs, but I couldn't get that to work, so I cut it down to 8.
ReplyDeleteIt also makes the display logic a lot easier. 8 bits to a byte, and typically 8 pins to an I/O port.
I believe I do my countdowns the same way the LTX does, actually, for hosted games. It's a bit late to pull one out to test, but I believe for a hosted game, it counts "down" to 0, and for non-hosted games, it counts "up" to 10.
That's also me being lazy again, though. This way, I can just throw the raw number that I get from the LTAR out on the display, and it works. I'd have to do some extra calculations to get it to count "up".
Really, though, I don't think it really changes anything either way. This is a different device from the LTX, and it displays things differently. Once I get it working, I'll be making another video to show off how it displays everything. I've added several rather important bits since I made that video.