As recently announced (here, here) the Airbana RFID tracker had its first demo this weekend and will be making it’s public player debut at First and Only Airsoft’s Terminator Salvation event.
The RFID tracker is something I’ve been working on for some time now, originally developed as a standalone series of weather proof detection pods that recorded the presence of nearby players in contended hotspots such as bunkers and other such objectives. Depending on the HSDPA coverage the pods could report their statistics back to the Airbana webservers or their data could be pulled off at the end of the day.
With HSDPA coverage the site organisers can see which team had control of an area and in theory with enough pod’s deployed see who was where. In offline mode the data is pulled off and parsed by the offline parser where it works out who was where at what times and can display the information as required allowing the organisers to categorically declare the results without having to have had a marshal at that particular location at all times throughout the day.
Unfortunately making the units lightweight, power grid independent, rugged and weather proof for use in woodland sites proved to be exceedingly expensive (each pod was working out to be around £600) so development paused for a while.
With the arrival First and Only’s ‘The Mall‘ skirmish site I was free to rely on mains power and didn’t have to worry about rain / snow etc. This brought the units down to around £300(ish) which is far more affordable (Airbana is a non-profit project I work on in my spare time!). The other benefit is that I can utilise a projector to give the players a 30 foot screen for feedback which will hopefully further improve the player experience.
The Technology
The RFID trackers are small (5cm x 4cm x 1cm boxes) active RFID transponders that the player carries around with them and as soon as they are within range of the detector (1 – 4 metres) the detector will start tallying up the scores. Each tracker is roughly £30.
If conflicting tags are detected then the scoring pauses until one team is defeated! As one teams score increases the other team’s decreases.
The detector pod comprises of a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom nano-itx motherboard, solid state disk for the operating system, 1Gb DDR RAM, the RFID detection unit (serial), power converter (AC to DC or DC to DC), LED diagnostic array and the steel shell – once it’s had a paint job I’ll put up some pictures.
There are two version of the Tracker software, for headless pod’s that simply record and relay the information the Tracker software is written in plain C and runs on a custom version of Linux based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5. The pod with a projector to provide feedback to users is written in C# and runs on Windows Embedded.
The Airbana Tracker software can be skinned to suit the theme of the day and in the case of the Terminator Salvation event the projected image looks like this;
When both teams are in range of the tracker (so we can assume a firefight is going on) then the screen changes to display this;
Future Plans
If the Tracker is well received by the players at the event then I will continue to work on the project adding features such as chained devices so a team has to hold multiple points in order for their score to increase, mobile handsets and much more.
In theory with enough pods and with all players carrying a tag then a Site Operator would be able to track where each and every player is and even play back their movements from the days event!
I would like to revisit the Woodland devices at some point but I need to do more work on the power sources.
