• Boards have arrived!

    Aaron • 10/03/2025 at 16:00 • 1 comment

    I ordered the boards and they've made it to the shores of the US. Also, grumble grumble grumble Tariffs...

    Anyway, here they are (front and back) in their resplendent glory:

    The silkscreen wasn't perfect, but that isn't super surprising. Silkscreen is usually applied with less precision than the mask or other layers. As a result, there's a little red peaking out at some of the black places. But overall I'm really happy with the way it turned out. 

    Initially I wanted to try immersion tin as a surface finish - thinking I might get a cleaner matte look. That turned out to be expensive though. So I went with the regular Lead-free HASL. 

  • We got a Larson scanner (sort of)!

    Aaron • 07/24/2025 at 04:54 • 0 comments

    The original StarSensor had two sets of LEDs on it. The 5 LEDs at the top keep score. The 8 LEDs arranged in a semi-circle around the center of the sensor are decorative. The distinctive bouncing back and forth of the LEDs screams 1980s through and through. It was on the front of KITT, in the Knight Rider series. It was on the enigmatic helmet (head?) of the Cyclons in Battlestar Galactica. It's a Larson scanner.

    The Larson Scanner is so named for Gary A. Larson - the television producer who put it into the aforementioned shows. Hackaday has touched on it lots if you want to dive further.\

    Anyway, I got some basic coding done and have managed to implemented the "Scanning" feature. It's not a true Larson scanner, as it lacks the decay of the trailing LEDs as the light passes back and forth. The arrangement of the LEDs and the GPIOs was such that I really had a tough time with the routing, and not every pin I'm using can be used with PWM with the timers. 

    Also, I still want to implement a buzzer into the design to create the sound - that'll require using the PWM for tones.

    I can probably accomplish the fading in software, but I'm going to try to implement my other plans first - once I have everything squared, I can revisit this and make it a bit more authentic.

  • Fancy Logos and masking layers

    Aaron • 07/22/2025 at 07:01 • 0 comments

    I've captured most of the development process over at my website, aaroneiche.com.

    I've been working over the last few days trying to get everything onto the right layer and into a shape and look that I like. I did something like this with my Kremzeeek! SAO last year, but the StarSensor is much more complex.

    I've got it mostly laid out. I want to add a speaker grill and on the back at least a footprint for  a piezo buzzer.

    I'm really proud of the LazerTag logo on the back.

    I really wanted to use RGB LEDs. I haven't tried the Hot-glue-as-a-light-pipe trick, which might make it work. But I may just stick with side-firing LEDs going through the substrate. At the moment they all fit, and the DRC mostly passed.

  • The StarSensor

    Aaron • 07/16/2025 at 06:38 • 0 comments

    I'm a child of the 80s. I grew up playing Nintendo. There's an original Teddy Ruxpin on the shelf immediately to my right. If you were a kid in the 80s in the US, you will almost certainly remember the startup sound of the LazerTag StarSensor.

    Just look at this picture and tell me you don't know the sound.

    I never actually had any LazerTag gear. I had friends that did though and I thought it was very futuristic, and very cool. If you're unfamiliar with the brand, it was an IR light-gun tag game line of toys. The most basic set was a gun, and a sensor. 

    I was thinking about making one of these last year for the 2024 Supercon SAO contest, but I already had two projects in the works and adding another would have been too much. So I held on to it for this year.

     Part of the appeal of this project is that its just 3 colors. It occurred to me with the right manufacturer I could produce this with a red soldermask, black silkscreen, and an exposed HASL surface. With the introduction of cheap full-color PCB silkscreen printing, the "art" of the SAO and badges in general might start to fall away. So this was a way for me to challenge myself to solve the layers creatively.

    I'm kind of approaching this project backwards. I'm confident I can get the electronics part working, so I'm starting out with the visual design.