During my masters i wrote many papers on new wifi technologies, one of which would be amazing for paintball:
Zigbee
While this will NEVER happen a bit about zigbee and how i would implement it, zigbee is a very low data rate wireless protocol which uses tiny amounts of battery (20 years on a watch battery is not impossible), it is inexpensive and perfectly suited to a self healing mesh network. What this means is should one unit lose connection to a base station it will try and find an alternate route through another "node". These devices for reference can be TINY.
Now picture every gun being a node with a base station somewhere near by, each node could transmit stats to the base station including average rate of fire, max rate of fire, GPS positioning and so on.
Why would this be cool? Imagine you can watch digitally (dots on a virtual field) whats happening if you cannot find a stream as each GPS node will be moving and transmitting in real time, you will know who is firing, how fast, how much paint has been shot, which direction they are shooting. An announcer could tell you XX player fires XX paint per game on average and get XX hits you can work out ratios, accuracy, efficiency you name it. A ref could get an alert if a gun is firing too fast or too hard or even changes settings mid game.
As for changing settings this can be done using a wifi device which connects through a base zigbee node but i dont see that as the best use of the technology.
Primarily i researched the use of Zigbee for medical purposes (recalibrating a pacemaker without surgery and without the risk of the battery needing changing every 5 years) but the implementation is simple and cheap.
Just thought it might be of interest to some, feel free to shoot me a PM for more information.
As a disclaimer it was a few years ago now that i worked with these devices so the technology may have slightly changed or gone in a slightly different direction by now, please do correct me if this is the case i would be more than interested, for those who might want to play if it is still available the "crossbow" zigbee platform was a nice little development kit you could get to develop on.
Regards,
Steve
Edit, i have changed some of the more technical terminology for more commonly used words which are similar for the sake of those less interested in the more geeky part of the technology and more interested in just understanding the concept i am trying to paint a picture of.
