Hi all! New the forum but have been using Arduino for many years on small hobby projects and tinkering. I'm thinking of a new project idea and want to check the feasibility with the community... Something along the lines of what's already been discussed here: Laser tag game using laser emitter & photoresistor? - #28
For the longest time, I've loved playing Laser Tag and now that my kids are getting old enough, I've taken them to the arcade a few times to play. But the nearest place to play is 6hr drive away as we live in rural Canada in a farm community. Anyways, I've been thinking about how to build my own setup.
I'd like to use 650nm laser diodes (like from a small Pointer or a DVD drive) as there's good range and cheap, and I've seen the TSL257 light voltage detector that could be used to register a beam hit on a player. But to prevent false positives (or determine what player it came from) I was hoping to have each player's sending laser be encoded by frequency or similar so that it can tracked correctly.
There's lots of info around using Arduino and microcontrollers to drive lasers but not much on using them for communication of data, but I recently came across this video ($3 laser transmits audio over 100m (arduino) - YouTube) of a long-range (100+ meters / 300+ feet) and streaming a 14khz WAV file from one Arduino to another and listening to the output on the other end. Obviously this is analog but this got me thinking about DTMF and how telephone systems use tones over analog lines to still clearly register digital data on the other end. So I'm thinking that if each laser sender was pulsing out a specific DTMF code via analog, then receivers could hopefully identify the incoming "hit" even if it's just for a fraction of a second and with distortion etc.
So anyways, I'm sure there will be some constraints like that it won't work outside in daylight or it might be difficult to hit a target (even stationary) at any kind of range, but still I think it'd be neat to try.
Any thoughts on this general idea?