For the past few months, my friends and I have been planning to make our own laser tag system that we can play at home. The goal is to make a laser tag system that we can modify and program different game modes. Why are we doing his? We just want to play some laser tag, and learn a couple of things along the way.

How Laser Tag Works

The technology we are dealing with uses infrared (IR) light. It’s been around for a long time, so if you’ve ever used a remote to turn on a TV, then chances are you’ve already seen this technology. This light is located past the lower end of the visible electromagnetic spectrum, so we can’t actually see it. But most digital cameras can still pick it up, so if you take a picture at the right moment, you can see something like this:

Remote control infrared operates at 38 kHz, which is very uncommon in nature. For our Laser tag set-up, we will be using infrared at the same frequency because it is a common standard. The core idea is very simple, have guns that fire off infrared and attach sensors on vests that can detect them. The logic will be handled by a programmable micro-controller. In our case, the Arduino.

Bill of Materials

Since we will be making several sets of guns, we decided to prototype one first, then mass produce the others. Here is our bill of materials for the first laser tag set, just to get us started.

Bill of Materials V1.0

Most of the parts were from China so we expected at least a month of lead time.