Rogerborg

Mmm, I may have been... slightly more than usually robust. There's nothing wrong with having ideas, as long as you're aware of the prior art, why it failed, and the very limited size of the target market. It's something that would be fun to lash up as a hobbyist project, even just for local site use. If you want a device, then Pi / Arduino GPS modules are dirt cheap now and you could do initial prototyping using wifi between devices to share their location. 11n claims a maximum of 250m outdoors although reality may have something to say about that. Once you start factoring in screen, input, sounds, battery and a case though... well, phones exist now, and you'll have to write software either way.

We're having a strong week of these.

I'm judging the ill advised pre-announcement of the newest bestest excitingest site, with nothing to back it up. Any engagement is a win, even negative, as you can leverage it into a positive if you have some substance to demonstrate. Wait-and-see promises will convince nobody. It's up to you where you want to invest your energy, of course.

What did you end up going for?

I've never had much luck with the cheap ones and my ham fingers, I prefer desoldering braid. Either one is worth a try.

+3 to the above. Renting will get you back into it and see if you're still keen in a couple of months. Given that you'd be spending on BBs anyway, rental packages don't run as expensive as they seem. If you do crack and decide to buy something before then, a cheap pistol to supplement a rental AEG isn't a crazy proposition. Pistols can generally be had two-toned fairly cheaply, and slides are replaceable or modifiable when you reckon you have a defence for that. If you're after silenced, the ASG Mk23 non-blowback green gas pistol is pretty popular, good value, and will perform in the cold. Another cheap option is the Army Armament R17 which can be had with either metal or polymer slides. Metal will give more kick, polymer will cycle better in the cold, and the real "steel" gun is plastic anyway. They take WE or TM mags just fine and can be had for half the price of a TM Glock 17. And the AAP-01 is getting a lot of love. Considering the amount of aftermarket parts available, fixing a two-tone will be easy enough. The problem with anything at the moment is finding it in stock.

No, he does teardowns for fun. People send him dead stuff, or interesting things, to sacrifice on the altar of pop-science.

Yup, bear in mind that an 11.1V block battery is just 3 x 3.7V cells wrapped together. You've got that, without the wrapping.

Doubtless so, there are few new ideas out there, and doing it as a phone app seems pretty obvious. Doing it as a site feature sounds great in principle, but in practice how many times have you seen complicated games simplified down during play when the site or marshal team haven't figured out the technology, or can't get it working, or it craps out mid game? And I stick to my point that if you hand out a couple of McGuffin Trackers that they'll doubtless go to the Marshal's Mates and most of the players won't even get a sniff of them, or particularly care that they're meant to be doing much beyond slinging plastic in yonder general direction.

What a great idea, especially for V3 gearboxes and those fiddly two-part triggers. The MP5K trigger in particular is a absolute mare to get in place while re-assembling - I gave up and actually twisted a bit of tension out of the spring.

To clarify, not the retailer fairs, but the car-boot end. It's not a hobby where we want to be seen flogging rifs to anyone clutching a sweaty handful of tenners. That's why I've only seen it done at sites running bring-and-buys for paying players rather than open days.

It's a standard V2 gearbox, so any generic instructional will do. These are as good as any, to get the gearbox out, then apart. I found that the gearbox on my CYMA took a good hard tug to get it out of the shell - you just need a bit of self confidence at that point. You only need to get it far enough apart to change the spring, although once you're in there you might as well check the shimming and sort the lubrication as well. The only fraught bit is getting it apart while it's still under spring tension: note that you need to push down on the spring and cylinder while you're splitting the gearbox, and get a screwdriver or similar into the spring guide to hold it down. It can be risky the first couple of times, and you might want to do it inside a clear plastic bag in case it all goes wrong and yeets the internals into hyperspace. Re-assembly is the opposite, and it does help to have 3 hands, or put some neodymium magnets under the box to hold the gears and latch in place and/or use an anti-reversal latch tool to hold that piece in place (eBay or ak2m4 although I can't find it there at the moment). You might benefit from taking a few picture as you go for things like which way round the latch goes, although there are loads of videos out there. As to what spring you'll need, notionally an M90 should be about right, but it all comes down to the air seal, and cylinder to barrel volume. A chrono is invaluable for taking the guesswork out of it.

Sorry to hear that, and we really do agree that he should have faced some form of justice long since.

Huh, I'd never even spotted that sticker on the bottom of mine, thanks.

Mmm, I've seen Area-66 having to spell that out a couple of times, they don't want mobs of randos swarming the site half way through the day that they can't keep track of.

Not that I'd noticed, I'd already blocked the bloke before he flipped the table. OP is just flexing. He'll either deliver a product, or he won't. Either way, he's not going to fill my face in, or see me in court. I'll be astonished if he files so much as a design patent, let alone a functional one. We can enjoy the brief frisson of drama while it lasts though, that's what the intarwebs are for. If you're going to re-invent something that's already been released and failed, something needs to be different, either with the features, the price or the market. It is a fair point that airsoft has come on since 2009 - more folk running comms, tracers, even NODS, and sites prepared to invest in props and things like AttackSense. I've had a look at the spec of the MT1268 and it looks reasonable enough: GPS for position[*], LPD433 (at an unspecified power) for unit-to-unit communication. However, that limits it to outside use, and liable to interference from (e.g.) folk flying drones. If that's 10mW LPD then a 500m range would be very optimistic, and essentially line-of-sight, thereby obviating much of the point of it as a find-the-McGuffin tracker. Consider that PMR runs at 500mW. The kicker was the price: $250 per non-water-resistant unit, i.e. $500 before you can do anything with them on a site. It's no wonder it vanished without trace. Given the tiny potential market, I'd sack off the idea of dedicated hardware and look at doing it as a phone app instead. There are already "family tracker" style apps that seem to fit the bill, and it wouldn't be super hard to roll your own. The issue would be sharing phone locations fast enough to be useful: you'd need a location with decent mobile data coverage, and then you'd have to provide hosting and "matchmaking" services, getting updates out to connected devices quickly enough, and with enough location resolution, to be useful. There's also the obvious risk of getting your screen shot out in-game. You could give the app away and charge a subscription for hosting. Doing it the other way around, a paid app and free service, would be a risky buy as it would likely collapse as soon as sales plateau. It's not a terrible idea, it might actually work. But anybody can have an idea. Following through to market - and long term support, once the orders dry up - is the tricky part. [*] You can forget the idea of using any sort of signal strength for estimating even distance, let alone direction. It comes up every so often, the NHS track-and-trace app tries it over bluetooth with pretty poor results. I was involved in a failed project to try and track phone locations (and thus crowd density) in stadia and concert venues using bluetooth and wifi discovery signals with multiple receivers at known locations. We never got anything close to usable fidelity, even with a short range line-of-sight setup, let alone with walls and such in the way.

The Southers will rise again!

He can dream, and I can roll my eyes at his dreams. I hope to be wrong, and to super-duper-apologise when I see a new product that can be bought from stock, from an actual retailer, with a warranty, that has a compelling feature list at an affordable price. It can happen, like tracer units. However, it's been my experience that ideas-guys floating vague "How do you do, fellow airsoft kids?" oblique narratives aren't on the success track. That applies double if the only thing standing between assured success and flouncing is some experienced cynical grumpy old bugger on the intartwebs.

throbbing.thirsty.delusional

And now my life's complete. Because Big Clive is sweet. (Super sweet!) Thank God we live this quiet little red-neck podunk white-trash In-ter-net town.

I didn't watch any of it. The problem is that he went full clickbait a while back, sucking up to the toxic Eurosnipers for more hits. It's a real shame, as he had a genuinely distinctive and useful channel before that.

And I'm sure you will be more successful than all the people who have "applied for patents" on all their airsoft innovations that require everybody to buy one in order for everybody to enjoy one. Don't PM me, we're not friends. You're just another fantasist.

You didn't answer the question of whether you're trying to flog that "tracker" device. I'll go ahead and assume that you are. Maybe you need to find a less experienced forum. Crack on, chap.

Don't overthink it. Provide the what3words for the site, as well as a postcode and a route description written by humans for humans. If people use the 3words, they use it. If they don't, they don't. It's pretty much the least important consideration for any event.