Inspiration
The Worcester Dining Hall Seating Problem is a recently-discovered but widely-known problem at UMass. Especially at peak hours, it is near impossible to find seating in Worcester, and an average student can spend upwards of 20 minutes simply in the act of looking for a seat. Not only is this incredibly inconvenient, it simply isn't fun. Do you know what IS fun? Laser tag. Thus, our idea was born: create a king-of-the-hill structure around the seating at Worcester, where students would have to participate in a Texas-quick-draw game of laser tag to see who gets any available seating.
What it does
Our project consists of two devices that act as a pair of laser tag setups. They take the form of cowboy hats that participants wear, consisting of IR sensors and emitters as well as WiFi-enabled microcontrollers. These sensor/emitter pairs act as the laser gun set up of firing device and targeting area. We then have the two cowboy hats communicate through HTTP requests on the same network to handle the act of registering hits and so forth.
Additionally, we included a framework for collecting data on matches. The goal is to provide a preview of what kind of matchups that a player has, so they know the odds that lay ahead of them as they attempt to claim a table.
How we built it
In order to build our projects, we used Arduino microcontrollers with WiFi modules to run the laser tag game logic. All code was written in C/C++.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was the first time two out of three of our group members did any work with hardware, and so this was an incredibly fast-paced learning experience for us all. Getting experienced in looking up pinout diagrams and wire protocols in a span of a few hours and getting something physical out of the other end of it was an immensely satisfying achievement.
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