Portable Electronic Water Sensors

[isoaker]

Y'know, after reading CA99's thread, made me wonder about objective tagging devices again.

While a tag device really limits which part of the body counts for a hit, it also reduces questions on whether a hit occurred on not in games with less familiar participants playing. Then I looked up "water sensor" on Amazon.com and found a number of "leak detectors" that could potentially be used as a tag device. For example: Leak Alert

Granted, that particular example is one the larger side to attaching to one's shirt (perhaps to be used hanging from a lanyard or something). Also not sure how well the rest of the device takes to being hit by a full blast of water. That said, this sort of device could solve a number of problems for certain types of games. Not a perfect solution for longer games where one wishes to allow more parts of a person to be viable soaking points, but perhaps good for quicker games where one wishes to focus on large area/definitive soaks.

I still want to try building a simpler device, but this might be an interesting option (the price isn't too bad) for helping with setting up full fledged tournaments.

[marauder]

If this was $3 I would buy a bunch just to test out. At $20 it's a bit much.

[atvan]

It's 21 for three…

[marauder]

It's 21 for three…

$7 is still a bit much. If we had problems with counting hits then this would be a solution, but things usually go pretty smooth in the battles I've been in recently.

[SEAL]

It says it sounds a 95 dB alarm when it gets hit with water. Not sure if that's loud enough to cause hearing damage, but being a person with particularly sensitive hearing, I'd rather not attach one of those things a foot away from my ears, haha.

But either way, like M4 said, we haven't really had many problems with counting hits, aside from that one assault round at Hydropocalypse, but even then, it wasn't a huge problem for me. There have always been disputes, but the way it should be done is, if the reciever feels what he/she deems to be enough water to count, that person should call out the hit, and that would be the end of it. I know in Nerf the person who makes the hit usually calls it, but I think it's easier the other way, even if it requires a little more honesty.

[isoaker]

But either way, like M4 said, we haven't really had many problems with counting hits, aside from that one assault round at Hydropocalypse, but even then, it wasn't a huge problem for me. There have always been disputes, but the way it should be done is, if the reciever feels what he/she deems to be enough water to count, that person should call out the hit, and that would be the end of it. I know in Nerf the person who makes the hit usually calls it, but I think it's easier the other way, even if it requires a little more honesty.

These are not the sort of devices I'd expect needed for the current community wars. However, should the day arise when we have events that allow on-site registration in larger urban centers, relying on honest for counting hits will, in all honestly, mostly likely prove problematic. Now, the things noted above are undoubtedly overkill (and probably too friggin' loud, too). I need to do some experimenting with some possibly cheaper solutions (though I had a feeling the resulting incarnations of my current thoughts will prove to be very amusing), assuming the thing works as I hope it would. Need to find time to play around with building devices.

[Andrew]

I've built a water sensor before. A really simple circuit board project at school. It's basically a broken circuit, and the water completes it, switching on an LED and a buzzer. You could probably buy and build a kit for less than $5.

If anyone has facilities to build PCB's themselves, it'd be even cheaper.

[mr. dude]

Thinking very far ahead here, but it would be pretty cool (for a huge game size, totally useless for anything relatively small) to have the sensor send out a signal to a central computer, ie notifying the head organizer that a player has been hit. There's a lot that can be done with that, but of course, such an idea is totally useless when we struggle to get teams big enough to populate a small park.

[HBWW]

Makes me wonder if it's possible to build a mesh kind of sensor system that would be integrated with a special t-shirt, although this is moving into rather high-tech territory here. (Especially if it can detect the size of the area hit.) Of course, mr. dude's idea approaches laser tag territory, but it could be interesting to implement if the stuff is there.

[marauder]

After thinking about it, I feel like if you want to wear electronic sensors to use for counting hits you might as well play laser tag. Even then, I've never been into outdoor laser tag. I absolutely love indoor laser tag, like Laser Quest (used to work there), with all the mirrors, black lights, smoke, etc. especially team battles.

[scottthewaterwarrior]

I don't think these wouldn't help to much, in the past there has been some argument about whether someone is hit, but most of the time the problems arise when two people hit each other at the same time (or so close no one can tell). Had to tell from the pictures but I also think these things look a bit small, the device itself is large, but only has a small hole to let water in. I think we would be better off using soaker tags. I'm still mad that I bought like 50 of those and then lost the bag before I even opened it.

Laser tag is alright, the equipment at the places I have gone never seams to work quite right though. Normally in any game, at least 1/10th my score is from accuracy, (25% last game) really makes me wonder how good I could get if those things had some irons on them!