No vests. No arena. No referees. No arguing. Grab your phone, grab your TRACER — and the game starts anywhere.
Provisional patents filed — US & Canada.
Everyone's lived it — backyard blasters, home laser tag, driveway Nerf wars. No one can prove who got hit, so it ends in an argument. And every alternative makes you compromise:
Why now: every phone is a camera + screen that supports advanced computer vision. On-device, it can finally confirm a hit on a person — with nothing worn by the target.
No vests. No arena. No referees. No arguing. Grab your phone, grab your TRACER — and the whole yard is in play.
The proof of concept. An ESP32-CAM and muzzle camera running the full loop — trigger, capture, Apple Vision, hit or miss. The printed shell was dremelled out by hand to fit the parts, no designed cavities yet. Sealed shut with a known one-behind capture bug still in it. Seventeen days from first circuit to working system.
The trust pass. Fixed the one-behind bug with a firmware buffer flush read from the frame logs, added the audio system and a laser, rebuilt the iOS app. Shell still hand-dremelled to fit the parts. Every shot now fresh and correct.
The platform rebuild. New processor, 5MP autofocus camera, and a move to WiFi — plus an interior designed around the components: custom cradles instead of a hand-dremelled shell. The end of the dremel era. US and Canadian patents filed in this window.
The identity. An original pistol platform designed in CAD from scratch, replacing the borrowed silhouette. Where TRACER stopped looking like an existing firearm and became its own product.
The integration. Real haptic recoil, an animated LED strip on a custom diffuser channel, and true battery reporting, all brought onto the new platform at once. Firmware grew to match — I2C haptics, FastLED states, a shared sensor bus. Rough and open-shelled, to prove the whole stack runs. It did.
The clean build. Full board bring-up: haptic auto-calibration, a fuel gauge fixed after a months-long bug, the complete BLE-to-WiFi handoff with gameplay over UDP. Firmware past 3,000 lines. Routed, closed, field-tested — the basis for the 25-unit fleet.
Six iterations in under four months — from zero electronics experience to a field-tested fleet.
~$8B global recreational-shooting market, growing 7–9% a year.
Solo, self-taught, no engineering team and no outside funding — Andy built five working hardware generations, the firmware, the iOS app, and an on-device computer-vision hit-detection system in four months.
Product design, enclosure, embedded hardware, firmware, Apple Vision integration, UX, field testing, and provisional patents — all in-house.
A multidisciplinary founder who turns capital into working product.
A working product, provisional patents, and a clear path to market. The hard part is done.
