The basic operation of a laser tag system can be found on Wikipedia.

“Laser tag is a team or individual sport or recreational activity where players attempt to score points by tagging targets, typically with a hand-held infrared-emitting targeting device.”

The two basic parts of a laser tag system are (1) a shooting element and (2) a target.

The laser tag system is a simple optical communications link. The shooting element is a modulated LED and the target is a photodetector.

Basic operation of the shooting element:

• Send a known signal

Basic operation of the target:

• Determine if the target was hit by a shooting element (i.e. the signal is not just noise)
• Determine the player by interpreting the signal sent

There are a variety of different methods to send a signal over an optical link. In this project we are going to use a very simple approach and assign each player a specific modulation frequency.

signals