I hate to be the one to have to give you this news, but you have been lied to your entire life. As it turns out, the laser tag guns that gave you so much joy in your youth (and beyond) do not in fact contain any lasers. None. And the truth about them is not pretty — they are nothing more than glorified TV remotes with triggers. Those weekend laser tag marathons of yours don’t seem so exciting or daring anymore, now do they?
We have YouTuber What’s Another Hobby to thank for this revelation. He recently took one apart to see what made it tick, because when you go by the handle “What’s Another Hobby,” that is the sort of thing that you do. Fortunately for us, rather than becoming disillusioned by this finding, What’s Another Hobby took it as an opportunity. Knowing that the infrared blasters in remote controls transmit data, he decided to convert his laser tag gun from an instrument of destruction into an instrument of texting.
A new way to deliver spam messages (📷: What’s Another Hobby)
All of this, naturally, took quite a good deal of poking and prodding. After tearing the blaster down and taking a peak at the signals it produces with an oscilloscope, What’s Another Hobby had a plan in mind — route some of the wires outside of the gun, then slap a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B computer on the side of it. Hey, it doesn’t have to look pretty — it just has to work.
The Raspberry Pi serves to switch the blaster’s infrared LED on and off very rapidly in a specified pattern when the trigger is pulled. The timing of the infrared light pulses encodes ones and zeros, which are, of course, the language of all modern digital devices. So by encoding a message in the binary representation of ASCII characters, the laser tag gun can blast text messages — not to be confused with actual SMS text messages, but messages made up of text, all the same.
To demonstrate the project in action, What’s Another Hobby set up a phone with an infrared receiver on a tripod, then took it outside for some target practice. Rather than blasting the phone into oblivion, the text blaster delivers a message that shows up in a text editor whenever the trigger is pulled.
This same setup could be used to control just about any other device that communicates via infrared if texting isn’t for you. It could control a TV or computer, for example.
This is an incredibly cool project, to be sure, but does it go too far? I mean, if we continue down this path, what might come next? Someone might do something really foolish like turn an NES Zapper into a wireless phone or something.