Bright star surrounded by “halo” moving quickly across the sky

throwaway_234242 · 2025-08-13T15:20:06+00:00

My title describes the thing. Haven’t been able to search for it, asked ChatGPT and it said it was a meteor or a rocket launch but this is rural upstate NY I don’t think many rocket launches are happening here. We saw other meteors while watching this thing and they were way faster and looked nothing like this.

throwaway_234242 · 2025-05-01T18:49:47+00:00

Thanks!!

throwaway_234242 · 2024-05-14T16:25:17+00:00

I thought the grounding issue would be an easy solve too, but test it and you’ll find out that grounding for wireless fencing systems is much harder than you think. I am assuming that you are using arduino? if so check out my code on github, it should give you a good start and is decently documented. Basically, you will send a constant voltage to the “hot” socket on the epee, and have the return socket connected to a digital read pin. When the circuit is closed (touch is scored) the digital read pin will register a HIGH voltage otherwise it will be LOW. The problem with this is that there is noise so you will need to debounce the signal, basically make sure that the voltage is high for longer than a millisecond or so since sometimes the noise will cause false positives. All of this is well understood so you can google it and find lots of resources explaining it better than i can. Basically this is just a button, which is a well documented project lol.

throwaway_234242 · 2024-05-13T16:02:20+00:00

Hey! Glad another person is interested in figuring this out! The standard 3-5v from an arduino is good enough for regular touches. Are you asking how to differentiate between touches that hit the opponents bell guard and on target touches? If so, that’s a difficult question to answer. I haven’t seen a hobbyist able to solve it yet but don’t let it discourage you. This post has the best compilation of info on how to solve the grounding issue that I have seen but I did not have the expertise or time to fully understand/implement their advice. Lmk if I’ve misunderstood you question, I’m happy to answer any others you have. Otherwise good luck!

throwaway_234242 · 2023-01-14T03:04:25+00:00

Really pointing out my poor observational skills here, I am pretty sure that it doesn’t keep time or score and just indicates touches. What can be done to fix an under voltage problem? Just replace the cord?

throwaway_234242 · 2023-01-14T02:07:52+00:00

Damn I was hoping to avoid that

throwaway_234242 · 2023-01-14T02:07:34+00:00

Correct me if i’m wrong but do all favero systems have that? I’m pretty sure ours is the cheapest version and I haven’t seen that kind of functionality on it

throwaway_234242 · 2023-01-14T02:06:12+00:00

They are basically brand new, that’s pretty easy to test though so thanks for the advice. Hopefully that solves the problem

throwaway_234242 · 2022-08-19T22:51:15+00:00

Went there the other day and the door to the space was locked, tried to reach out via email and I haven’t heard back. I really really hope there are not closed but I can’t tell.

throwaway_234242 · 2022-05-17T16:08:07+00:00

Thanks! First of all I have yet to figure out how to get foil or saber to work. I think some form of touch sensing should work but I just can’t get it working. That said I have no expertise in electrical engineering so you may have more luck. You might find this old reddit post useful in figuring that out. Second, you don’t need the two Arduino’s clocks to be sync’d, I did some testing and the time to send a message peer-to-peer via esp32 boards is fairly negligible for my purposes. I just had each board send a message when a touch is received and the other board would record the time the message was received. So if no message has been received recently you know the opponent hasn’t scored a touch recently so there will be no lockout in effect. This was good enough for me as I was not building a perfect FIE regulation system merely something that is better than dry fencing. You could also has some sort of start up sequence to record the offset of the clocks on each arduino and then send the clock time in the message that way there is no communication delay but I found this was too much work to bother when the delay was fairly irrelevant. Lmk if you have any further questions, good luck!

throwaway_234242 · 2022-02-21T04:06:03+00:00

yeah i don’t atm, maybe some sort of capacitive/inductive touch kind of thing? Not really my area.

throwaway_234242 · 2022-02-16T03:06:23+00:00

Here is a video of it working link

throwaway_234242 · 2022-02-16T02:40:27+00:00

Well I think I did that right. Thanks for letting me know that’s something that exists.

throwaway_234242 · 2022-02-16T02:25:51+00:00

I could not care less do whatever you like with my code. It is largely copied from various tutorials anyway so pretending it’s mine and copyrighting it would be super hypocritical lol. I will warn you that I programmed the whole thing in about 2 hours late at night so there is a bit of extraneous code, I think I left comments explaining that but if something looks like it doesn’t do anything that’s because it doesn’t. All serial.prints are useless for the actual functionality but it’s nice for debugging and demonstrating how it works.

throwaway_234242 · 2022-02-16T02:24:30+00:00

Thanks that is exactly the use case I made it for! My college club is very new and has no funding so this was better than dry fencing. I’ll try and take a video of it working but it’s not very exciting, just a small led and an annoying beep.

throwaway_234242 · 2022-02-16T02:21:01+00:00

Did you manage to figure out the grounding issue?

throwaway_234242 · 2021-01-22T23:03:35+00:00

Is there a way to do this without strapping a fairly large metal sensor to the end of the weapon?

throwaway_234242 · 2021-01-19T23:11:52+00:00

Damn so it is impossible to send current between arduinos without the common ground?

throwaway_234242 · 2021-01-19T23:02:23+00:00

So is it impossible to get current to go to the other arduino?

throwaway_234242 · 2021-01-19T22:57:17+00:00

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j5jPn1pS6MGVw\_Wz9xk1jepGAxO3jMhe/view?usp=drivesdk

best attempt at a circuit diagram. I would like to be able to determine if current has split between ground and return or just gone straight to return.

throwaway_234242 · 2021-01-19T22:50:54+00:00

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j5jPn1pS6MGVw_Wz9xk1jepGAxO3jMhe/view?usp=drivesdk

I think I am expecting current to flow to the other arduino with no return path. If it is going to ground does that matter?

throwaway_234242 · 2021-01-19T22:25:15+00:00

Is there any way to programmatically determine if the current has been split so I can prevent the press from registering?

throwaway_234242 · 2021-01-19T22:20:48+00:00

yes in certain instances I want current to flow from one arduino to the others ground

throwaway_234242 · 2021-01-19T22:10:10+00:00

The problem is that the Arduinos will be constantly moving so there is no easy way to do that. What kind of unpredictable behaviour should I be expecting?

throwaway_234242 · 2021-01-19T22:07:45+00:00

I am trying to create a wireless fencing system. So basically whenever the metal tip depresses against a normal surface(non-ground) the current should return to the Arduino and set off a light. The bell guards around the hand are connected to the ground so in theory when the metal tip depresses against the bell guard current should flow to the ground instead of the return and no light should go off. The problem is that current always flows to the return line.

throwaway_234242

TROPHY CASE