Laser Tag Set

Overview

Despite the name, a laser tag set contains no lasers. Each IR Blaster fires a burst of invisible 940 nm infrared light, the same wavelength a TV remote uses, focused into a narrow cone by a lens. Each Sensor Vest carries receiver domes that decode the burst, register the hit, and dock the wearer's health. A Scoring Hub referees the whole game over a 2.4 GHz radio link, and a Charging Base brings the packs back to full between rounds. Using an LED instead of a laser makes the system eye-safe at any range and any duration of exposure, which is why consumer sets are exempt under IEC 62471 photobiological limits.

How a shot works

Pulling the Trigger Switch tells the Blaster Control Board to encode a shot packet: the player's ID, team, and weapon damage, serialized into a bit stream. The board modulates that stream onto a 38 kHz carrier and the Power MOSFET driver in the IR Emitter Module pulses the IR LED at several amperes for a few milliseconds, far above the LED's continuous rating, but safe at this duty cycle.

The optics determine the game. Bare, the LED would flood a whole room; behind the Collimator Lens, set to focus by the threaded Lens Tube, the beam narrows to a 2-4 degree cone. At 30 m that cone is roughly 1-2 m across, wide enough that aiming is forgiving, tight enough that you must actually point at the target. Indoors the effective range grows because IR reflects off walls and ceilings, which is also why serious indoor arenas dim their lighting: fluorescent and sunlight both carry IR that the receivers must reject.

Feedback sells the shot. The Muzzle LED flashes visibly, the Speaker plays the shot sound, the Recoil Motor jolts the grip, and the Ammo Display decrements. The board enforces magazine size and reload delays in firmware, so the game has rhythm rather than a continuous IR floodlight.

How a hit registers

Each Sensor Dome on the vest pairs a translucent Dome Cover with an integrated IR Receiver, a photodiode, 38 kHz band-pass filter, and demodulator in one package. The filter is what makes the game playable in daylight: sunlight and lamps are broadband, but only a signal switching at 38 kHz passes through to the decoder. The Vest Controller Board validates the packet (friendly fire on or off, no self-hits via the tether), applies the damage, fires the Hit Buzzer, and flashes the Team LED Strip. When health reaches zero the strip goes dark, the blaster is disabled for the respawn period, and the elimination is reported to the hub through the RF Module.

Five domes, chest, back, both shoulders, and one on the blaster itself, give close to 360-degree coverage. Putting a sensor on the blaster matters competitively: without it, players learn to hide their vest behind cover and expose only the gun.

Refereeing and game modes

The Scoring Hub turns isolated hardware into an actual game. Its Compute SoC Module tracks every hit event from every vest in real time, runs the selected mode, team deathmatch, last-player-standing, timed respawn, capture variants, and shows live standings on the LCD Panel. The Hub Keypad sets team assignments, time limits, and damage rules before the round, and the hub's speaker calls game start and end. Because the IR link only flows blaster-to-vest, the radio back-channel is what makes kills attributable: the vest reports who shot it, and the hub credits the shooter.

Power and charging

Blasters and vests each run a LiPo Cell sized for two to four hours of play. The Charging Base docks the whole set at once: shaped cradles in the Base Enclosure align each device onto Pogo Contact pins, a shared BMS Board manages per-bay constant-current/constant-voltage charging, and a Charge LED per bay reports red-charging or green-full. A single mains Power Supply feeds the dock. Pogo contacts rather than plugs survive the handling a children's product actually gets, the dock is also simply where the set lives between games, with the Carry Case for transport.