About ‘Lazer Tag HQ’

If you are looking for a PC based hosting station that works with the Lazer Tag Team Ops brand of laser tag gear, you’ve come to the correct place. I have created the Lazer Tag HQ hosting station (LTHQ for short) and I am willing to share my work. I am NOT trying to earn any profits from my work; any cost you see are purely my cost in parts and shipping. Support is limited as I have a day job and a life outside of laser tag as well.

History

I’ve have been working on an PC based Lazer Tag Team Ops Hosting station since January 2010 — of which most of the work was accomplished in the first few months. It has been an 80/20 thing.. 20% of my efforts has brought me 80% of the results… I’ve been working the rest of the 80% to finish up the last 20%.

Between personal issues and family life, I haven’t had as much time that I would have liked.

Details

The hosting station is a combination of PC software (current runs under Linux, will work inside a VM environment) and external IR interface hardware (serially connected). As most computers only have USB ports, it’s recommended that you get a USB to serial adapter that works well with Linux and Windows (surprisingly, many work better with Linux it seems). See the FAQ section on recommended USB-to-Serial adapters.

[rant section] I picked Linux as it is the OS of choice for me and I didn’t want to have to spend hundreds of dollars getting development platform setup and configured and then LEARNED, I needed to hit the ground running with what I know already. Then having to deal with Windows updates that may or might not break my code (or worse, having to have one of EVERY Win version to test my code against)… sorry I don’t have that kind of money! Windows XP was the last of a decent developer platform. Supporting Windows natively will probably NEVER happen — please people, don’t bug me! [end rant section]

The hardware is a custom board with two micro controllers running custom code that offloads the critical timing require when producing and receiving IR signals to the LTTO gear. The host software is CLOSED SOURCE (yes you can do that with Linux) as it contains features and functions that I cannot share do to the arrangements I’ve made with Shoot The Moon. Don’t ask, I won’t release the code. What you’ll get is a LiveCD that can be ran booted from CD or installed to various places including inside a virtual machine (recommend FTDI based USB to serial adapters if you install inside a virtual machine).

Delivery of 1.0

Shipping of the current hardware has commenced. However production runs are limited and only come in spurts. Visit the waitlist if you want to check out the status on up coming orders.

More qustions?

Perhaps they are answered here.