MILES System for Airsoft?

[MillerSA15]

In theory all you would need to do is ensure the lasers/receivers are both on the same frequency and they would work together. In practice that might not be the case though.

[Steve]

I know the MILES 2000 system sends data along the path, so the receiver actually picks up what laser unit fired the kill shot. And I think, but don't recall, that the initiating unit actually records the kill as well. Not sure how the MILES system handles the data bus, but I'd guess it was somehow similar to how the series 2 xBee mesh networks work.

Assuming the units were using light beams, you could use a pulse-width modulation of the light beam to pass data, but the amount of data you could push in a short burst would be pretty small. Like, a couple of bits small. Maybe 128 unit identifiers max (7 data bits and a checksum bit). If you were using a synchronized clock and a mesh network, you could use a laser to hit the target, and at the same time publish to the network that at time "x" pack whatever fired. The pack that was hit could report that within a few milliseconds it took a hit, and whatever pack fired closest to the recorded impact time would get credit for the kill. Any shots that weren't linked across the network as a hit would be ignored as misses.

What I don't know is whether or not all of the necessary components would fit into the tracer unit form factor. For the sake of sanity, I'd probably put the main microprocessor into the receiver harness and tie the tracer / laser unit into the same PAN as the receiver harness.

Regardless, it'd be a lot of work to layer laser tag onto airsoft. MILES was terrible. MILES 2000 was better tech, but I personally never saw it implemented at a level where the awesome new features were actually useful. Not saying it didn't happen, mind you. Just that I never saw it happen (mainly because key leaders were so burned out on gen-1 MILES that everyone just assumed that it would shit the bed regularly).

Given my druthers, I'd probably just stick to shooting at each other with plastic pellets.