We are at last making some progress towards having a field for laser tag. If all works out we could be in a position to open late this year or early next year, but there are still some major hurdles to get over before we start celebrating.
|
||||||
|
Healthy Howard Day is focused on improving the health and wellness of Howard County citizens. The day marks the end of the 10 week “Get Active Howard County” program which encourages a healthy lifestyle change, and the beginning of the “Stay Active Howard County” program which hopes to maintain the healthy lifestyle developed in the 10 week program. More information can be found about these “Active Howard County” programs can be found here ( http://www.stayactivehowardcounty.org/). Now if only we can get the Ravens Cheerleaders to step up. Game on!  Taggers replace pom-poms at Redskin Games My thanks to the ladies for being good sports and also for supporting T*A*P*S (http://www.taps.org) We were honored and pleased to be able to mark this memorial day with a TagParty event at Andrew’s Air force Base in partnership with the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors Organization (T*A*P*S ). As you can see from the photographs in our album the kids and their mentors had a blast.
We were graced by the presence of the beautiful Miss Teen Maryland at a recent event
We just re-qualified our CPR and First Aid training, though we hope we never have to use any of it. There has been a few changes over the years and in general things are much simplified, with more emphasis on pumping the chest than the breathing.  CPR Certificates Having already tried the charger by itself, and ran into problems with unbalanced recharging of the cells (see earlier post here), this charger and regulator upgrade go hand in hand for our TagParty Business. Difficulties in finding a suitable regulator and an easy integration into the tagger had put this project on the back burner, but the effort of recharging batteries for 3 crews last summer forced it back to the top of our must do list. The project was further stimulated by a post on the LaserForums board which used a smaller regulator and presented the possibility of an easier integration. We took advantage of the fact that we already of the super capacitor in place (Magic Drone Mod) and found a neat way to integrate in the regulator, shown in the pictures below:
The jack on the side provides an easy way to monitor the battery pack voltage and is also used for charging. The charger takes advantage of the fact that we are only allowing our battery pack to drop down to just below 9 volts before recharging. Typically we can get 4 parties out of a set of batteries starting at 9.6 -9.9V (1.6 – 1.65V per cell as per the PureEnergy specifications) and dropping down about 9V. This gives us excellent life as the batteries prefer a shallow discharge. Our charger is a constant voltage supply set to 9.9V. A 10 ohm resistor in the tagger gives us a slow and decreasing charge current as the battery charges and the voltage differential between the supply and the battery decreases. The jack and resistor are installed as shown below with the resister (positive) attaching to the 9V power line (red wire in photo) on the bottom right of the main PCB and the negative going over to ground on the bottom left of the PCB:
Finally we tape up the cells into a pack and charge 8 taggers simultaneously off one charging supply; much easier and quicker than individually charging AA cells as shown in the last picture.
Our Spring 2010 TaggerTalk Newsletter was just published (archive copy can be found here). If you want to subscribe to the TaggerTalk you can register (under the META heading bottom right of the page), sign-up on the TagParty website, or use the link in the Newsletter. Take note of our special offer in the Newsletter. Just spent the day installing new chips into the TagParty Sport Taggers. The new version of the software corrects a few minor bugs and adds some new feature that I look forward to using in some games. One of the new features is the regenerative shield aka Halo like play. It probably will take a few games to work out what are the best settings, in terms of amount of shield and lives etc., but it should create an interesting tactical scenario. I guess I need to play a bit of Halo myself, until the snow clears and let me get out and play some real first person combat. |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2010 TaggerTalk - All Rights Reserved 
|
||||||
