Now the dust has settled.....

Well. The Babylon 5 game has been and gone now, so time to start working on future stuff.

 

Bit more of a text wall this time…


Kit wise, the PPG’s and sensors went down well and did the job. The sensors need a few tweaks to the startup/programming sequence before being published, and a couple of changes are needed to the PPG model to improve the glue area for the grip as a couple of ppg’s broke the glue. On the flip side, the belt clips for the sensors held fine, so I’ll be using a little trick from them to improve the glue surface 😊

 

The sensor tweak is basically to change how it enters setup – rather than the current going into setup option every powerup, you will need to hold the button down when turning it on to enter setup. Add in changing the button press to a hold-down to indicate how many hits are remaining rather than a simple press and that’s that sorted based on feedback – couple of hardware workarounds as well for the power switch as the push-to-make-push-to-break power button wasn’t a total success, and a slide switch will be a better choice going forwards but it’s what was available at the time – basically a printed Collar added around the button to reduce the chance of it being accidentally pressed.


The other change planned is an option in the setup to not count hits and just register them for those that want to go with the more “traditional” way of counting your own hits (Which also leads into a different conversation thread I’ve been having with others about incorporating the system into games that use traditional Larp weapons)

Once they are done, the things will be getting published so that should be in the next couple of weeks, as will new circuits for small pistol props to include an “ammo out” LED and a reload button as well as a more powerful output circuit that drives the emitter at 1.5 Amp – There is a weird story around this one and mosfets, but the circuits delayed while I’m waiting on a new bench PSU that can handle more than 1 amp….

 
I was also originally planning a couple of weeks off after the game, but there has ben so much enthusiasm from the players that it’s gotten rather infectious and I’ve started the first steps on the Project Arcturus Data system, which currently appears to have thrown up an odd little thing about getting two different models of picaxe talking to each other. There should be a way around it, which will be tested later and all being well the forum should be able to throw up some other ideas if there are still problems.
 
We’ll get there.
 
Worst case scenario, if the glitch is with picaxe specific stuff and there's currently no workaround as the Picaxe chips are basically Pics with bootloaders I can wipe them and use the as the PIC chip that they are. This is kinda a last resort thing as it would slow development time considerably as I would need to get up to speed with C which I have started doing, then code up a pin for pin replacement for the circuits. Not impossible, but would need time.
 

In the meantime we have a working system. So there’s that 😊

Watch this space for the coming baseline sensors and other circuit documentation.