Safety Last

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My Milestag sniper rifle is coming along nicely. It has to be ready for the 22nd September when my son plans to use it at his lasertag party. The plan is to have two teams of 8 against a lone sniper.

I've added a couple of features to the rifle:

I've added a Barrett style muzzle brake:

And a mount for the RJ9 connector for the head sensors:

I've plumbed in the LS2020 laser module and this is working. This is going to be used at a commercial lasertag site, which uses Adventure Sports equipment. I have created a special version of my open source UMT code to be compatible with the AS protocol.

I've decided to play it safe with the LS2020 laser. Even though it is a class 1 device, I have modified the software to enable the PIC watchdog timer. The worst case Milestag packet length is around 27ms (all 1s). My software kicks the watchdog only in the 'turn the laser off' code which is called continuously unless a Milestag packet is being transmitted. The watchdog timeout is set to around 30ms and so if anything goes wrong and the laser is left on, the watchdog will reset the PIC and turn it off. So the laser will only ever be on for a maximum of 30ms.

The final step is to align the laser with the telescopic sight. To achieve this I've printed an adapter to allow me to attach a bullet camera to the telescopic sight:

And I've created a special version of the software that sends a Milestag packet every 500ms so I do not have to stand there pressing the trigger and reload buttons as I line up the sights.