ZephyrEye on Tom’s Hardware
Hmm, my blog hit count is going through the roof … This project must be the coolest thing ever, all your base are belong to me!
Oh wait, the stats beg to differ … Aha, the project was featured on Tom’s Hardware! That makes sense.
I realize there’s not a lot yet – I’m still catching up! That being said, please feel free to leave comments. Is it cool? Is it useful, in paintball? As a paperweight? Let me know! And as always, feel free to ask questions in the comments or email me at nelsobra@onid.orst.edu anytime.
For those of you coming from Tom’s Hardware, I realize the image was a bit of a letdown – my blog at the time of writing was a little short on options for them. I’m jumping ahead of my original posting plan, but for all Tom’s geeks I thought it might be worthwhile to add a small gallery that goes through the setup screen to help understand the project a little better.
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- Main Screen – The first screen that appears when the ZephyrEye is turned on.
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- Select a game to play (King of the Hill is the only one programmed in so far)
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- First page of game setup
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- Setting up GPS starting and hill locations, starting with Team A’s starting location.
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- Setting up team B starting location
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- Setting up GPS coordinates for the hill
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- At this point, the game setup is complete and the “captain” ZephyrEye broadcasts the game and accepts other players.
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- When a game is broadcast, another ZephyrEye can find it and join the game on either team.
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- Picking Team B so there are two sides to this game.
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- The game is all set up, players have joined, and everything is ready to go! See video for countdown and gameplay screen.
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- Concept artwork of a hopper with an integrated ZephyrEye
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- Real screenshot from the ZephyrEye screen, but of a dummy game (real gameplay looks a little different, see videos).
BTW, if anyone is interested, I have a few extra circuit boards (about 6) that I would be willing to mail for free to anyone interested. They require a bit of handiwork (mostly SMT parts, and a few patches for bad board layout) but as shown they can be made to work. Besides the circuit boards, I think it will cost around $150-$200 to finish out the rest of the parts.
Email me if interested.
I would be interested in those boards!
I will be looking for your email when I get out of school where I cannot get to my gMail account!
Thanks,
Eric
Actually I looked around and couldn’t locate your email on the site! I could just be blind though….
Hopefully you could pull my email from this as the administrator so I could get in touch with you about the boards.
Thanks again,
Eric
It’s here and there in a few posts, but I should have posted it here! nelsobra@onid.orst.edu
I’m getting quite a few requests, so this evening I might make a post on who may want to get them and who may want to wait for Revision 2.
hay its posted on hackaday too. i love this and i wonted mind the messed up boards too
You have a link on hackaday now too.
You may want to release schematics for everyone :)
At one time i wanted to build lazer tag guns with HUD’s and feed back. Out door paint ball would be great with this. I also wanted to build paint ball tanks once too.
Doing is better then thinking. Good job.
Heh heh, yeah I noticed … so did my stats … I thought about making another post congratulating myself on another noteworthy link, but I’m trying to contain my excitement so I don’t appear publicly like the small child that I really am inside…
As posted on “ZephyrEye: Source Code” post, the entire source for this project can be found at http://code.google.com/p/zephyreye/. There is also an image of the schematics on the “ZephyrEye: Schematics” post.
The source schematics, board layout, and code are all available through that Google Code project. It doesn’t require authentication to check out with SVN or to browse the file tree, but as I haven’t checked without being logged in please do let me know if the files are not accessible.
Thanks for the pat on the back – If only I could convince my wife that doing is better than thinking on the bank account … ;)
haha, yah the not doing on my part is due to lack of funds. My wife already complains about the things i do buy.
I pulled the source down. So you dont need a user name to get it.
One thing i was wondering about, does the radar always show north? or does movement make the map rotate to your direction?
Yep, for now it only shows north. It’s a little easier on the processor that way. On Rev2, I plan to add a digital compass that will help this out.
Check out the blog posting I just released for more info on Revision 2 plans.
One question is this a radar positioning system? does it let you know were others are? i’ve been trying to build one of these myself i have not yet been able to get anywere nere this, i really like this gadget.
Each person you want to track the location of must have a ZephyrEye. Each ZephyrEye has a GPS module, which figures out where in the world it’s at and then transmits that location to all other ZephyrEyes on the same wireless ZigBee network. “Enemy visibility” can be optionally turned off. So I usually try to put “radar” in quotations because it’s only mimicking what Halo or other video games call enemy radar.
It also can be programmed to monitor games, such as King of the Hill or Capture the flag. Think “virtually” though – virtual flag, well-defined virtual boundaries in the woods, or a virtual hill. It also keeps score on these games.
I like to think about Halo Capture the Flag – You have a virtual GPS flag at your base, and when someone runs through that position, they have “captured” the flag and appear on everyone’s ZephyrEye. If they make it back, the flag automatically returns to its original position. First team to capture it, say, 5 times wins. Makes for a lot more variety of games that can be played!
Make sure to join the Google Code project if you’re interested in spending your development efforts on this project!
any tips on actualy playing the games, i have at my disposal:
a pe class full of teenagers
a large field
Could these devises be used to find equipment in a facility? Say four forklifts and several other jack trucks on four other device screens?
It’s possible, but depends on your facilities. Outdoors, it should work fine, but indoors GPS has some issues getting signal and even when you get it, it’s not usually very accurate. You’d have to test with one of them (at least with the same GPS chipset) to get a good feel for how well it would work.
The other concern is the size of your facility. If it’s all steel construction with sheet metal siding, the devices might have range issues. But like with the GPS issue, testing is really the only way to confirm whether it would work or not!