I hate to be the one to have to present you this information, however you’ve been lied to your whole life. Because it seems, the laser tag weapons that gave you a lot pleasure in your youth (and past) don’t actually comprise any lasers. None. And the reality about them is just not fairly — they’re nothing greater than glorified TV remotes with triggers. These weekend laser tag marathons of yours don’t appear so thrilling or daring anymore, now do they?
We have now YouTuber What’s One other Interest to thank for this revelation. He just lately took one aside to see what made it tick, as a result of once you go by the deal with “What’s One other Interest,” that’s the kind of factor that you simply do. Fortuitously for us, moderately than changing into disillusioned by this discovering, What’s One other Interest took it as a chance. Realizing that the infrared blasters in distant controls transmit information, he determined to transform his laser tag gun from an instrument of destruction into an instrument of texting.
A brand new technique to ship spam messages (📷: What’s One other Interest)
All of this, naturally, took fairly a great deal of poking and prodding. After tearing the blaster down and taking a peak on the indicators it produces with an oscilloscope, What’s One other Interest had a plan in thoughts — route among the wires exterior of the gun, then slap a Raspberry Pi 4 Mannequin B laptop on the facet of it. Hey, it doesn’t should look fairly — it simply has to work.
The Raspberry Pi serves to change the blaster’s infrared LED on and off very quickly in a specified sample when the set off is pulled. The timing of the infrared mild pulses encodes ones and zeros, that are, after all, the language of all fashionable digital units. So by encoding a message within the binary illustration of ASCII characters, the laser tag gun can blast textual content messages — to not be confused with precise SMS textual content messages, however messages made up of textual content, all the identical.
To display the challenge in motion, What’s One other Interest arrange a telephone with an infrared receiver on a tripod, then took it exterior for some goal observe. Slightly than blasting the telephone into oblivion, the textual content blaster delivers a message that exhibits up in a textual content editor each time the set off is pulled.
This similar setup could possibly be used to manage nearly every other gadget that communicates through infrared if texting isn’t for you. It may management a TV or laptop, for instance.
That is an extremely cool challenge, to make certain, however does it go too far? I imply, if we proceed down this path, what would possibly come subsequent? Somebody would possibly do one thing actually silly like flip an NES Zapper right into a wi-fi telephone or one thing.