When I was very young, me and my brother recieved two Nerf laser tag blasters for Christmas. These worked well but drained batteries quickly and only allowed two people to play at one time. My brother wanted some more and so did I. I was just starting to learn about electronics, so I decided to build them instead of buy them. This was a very bad decision. Technically, I still have not finished them, as I have not make a custom PCB or case for the electronics.
My first attempt started off well, but probably would not have worked. The design would have also been incompatible with the Nerf blasters we had. Since I had almost no idea of what I would be doing, or where I would get the parts, I pulled out my dad's copy of The TTL Databook and designed the circuit around rare chips. At this point my dad set up AVR Studio 4 on my computer and had me read "C Programming for Microcontrollers" by Joe Pardue. This attempt eventually failed as well because I got stuck on how to program it to interpret an IR signal. My dad suggested using an IR library, but I chose not to use it because I did not think that the Nerf blasters used a standard IR protocol. I also encountered problems designing a proper IR filter.
By this time, the laser tag project had become known (at least to me) as the project that would never be finished. For several years, the project remained in a mostly unchanged state while I worked on other projects such as learning how to use Arduino on a Boe-Bot. Eventually, I tried restarting the project, this time with Arduino. Using the IR library made the coding trivial, especially once I found out that the Nerf laser tag blasters could be used with it. The code is now complete, and I even made a program for Windows to adjust settings. However, one challenge still remains. The circuit board has not been designed, but once the circuit is on a PCB, I think I can call this project complete.
Files:
The schematics may not be correct. I built a version recently (June 2019) and I believe that the polarity of the trigger was wrong. It would be wise to look at the code when debugging the circuit.
Lazer Tag Gun Code (ino)