This was our final project and the one which carried the maximum weightage, and we were more pumped up than ever to make something interesting, but at the same time all of us were already struggling with the crazy amount of work we had already been assigned in other subjects along with our end semester exams approaching in a week.

We had thought a lot about of ideas, we wanted to go beyond using a generic wearable say maybe a glove, or a shoe? Although those items are fairly tough to work with, we wanted to do something different, explore more, maybe even get some fun out of it.

We thought about ideas like a Heads Up Display on motorbike helmets, a glove that converted sign language to speech, air cooled shoes, laser tag, etc. We were torn between choosing something that was fun or something that helped a cause, and after being confused as heck, we went to our instructor for inputs. Since the sign to speech glove was not a new idea, he told us to go for the laser tag, what we had proposed to him was a wizard themed laser tag.

We’ve all been deeply influenced by Harry Potter, irrespective of the fact that we might not even be interested in it, it is a big thing. The story of the boy who lived has taught us a lot of things and inspired us to think crazy. So, here we are, we thought of making a laser tag game such that, we are wizards with armours and we used either lasers or infrared rays to cast an attacking spell and the spell would cause certain damage and the person could feel it. There will be different types of attacks which could be voice operated or area specific.

We faced waaayyyyyyy too many struggles this time. Now when you have to implement a game like laser tag, it has to have at least two people and we have to make apparatus for at least two people. Looking for two microcontrollers (Raspberry Pi) itself was a tough task.

Now one of the microcontrollers that we had was not working and we had to find another microcontroller. Apart from this, we had to link the multiple microcontrollers with each other too. Parth had been sitting for ages in front of his laptop to figure out and work out an effective communication using different methods like bluetooth, servers etc.

When it came to hardware, we couldn’t find our armor anywhere in the market, if we did, it was a proper tactical jacket which was not economically feasible and we had ended up making our own armor from scratch too. The design took long to make, because we had to incorporate some sort of wizard element too which would obviously be a cloak, but that would cover a lot of area which can be used for detection, nonetheless we came up with an effective solution which designing our armor.

Also, we had used vibration motors to provide haptic feedback to the player, but those motors were extremely very delicate and the wires would come out very easily making it challenging to use those.

The biggest struggle was to somehow manage to successfully implement this project with so many more things in hand at that time.

We completed the whole project.........yup, that the achievement........nothing fancy here. We never had a night when we fully slept, but now as it is all over, we will sleep peacefully like a baby.