Neat title isn’t it? Wish I could play paintball more often. D’you reckon paintballs are a good tagging exercise? Hmm!
What I and my counterpart have been up to is finding more larger scale materials to apply to our design. Why paint balls? We’re trying to find a way to identify attackers if they get away from you after you’ve been involved in a skirmish, mugging or other physical altercation. Our research yielded the fact that if you smacked someone with the base of our design (as we’ve decided is our weaponized bit of the design), it would either stamp an RFID (radio frequency identification) on you or a needle of some kind would punch your skin and leave a mark, tattoo style.
This is an RFID- look familiar? To several of you with pets, they’re very familiar. A tag version of these are also available- in books! These and tattle-tape.
Unfortunately, those are also pretty illegal. Beat someone with a flashlight? Totally legal, self-defense. RFID them? Invasion of privacy and you’ve chipped them, big no-no (such timing for technological privacy!). The base of the flashlight is a slight pyramidal design- not really protruding, but enough so that if you clock someone with it it’d do some damage and leave a mark. Do we leave our marking idea at a bruise branding? Do we add an permanent ink component to the pyramid, so there’s a bruise as well as some impressive ink marking? The paintballs come in now- if we had a burst paint component that, upon smacking someone with it, burst, would that be better?
We then, however, have the issue of people being able to remove and change their clothes fairly quickly, and the user then being covered in paint. Bruise branding is looking better and better, but we’re still looking around for a few different ways to tag an attacker that doesn’t violate privacy laws.
Life really would be much easier if everyone just carried around a cellular device that snitched on you (OH WAIT) and your location. Can we harness this? Our top notch researchers at the Neon Shields Awesome Academy (pictured above), were investigating new and better ways to tag people, not get sued, and the next cool additions to our design- the speaker.
We’ve already looked at (and started ordering) the LEDs we want, and are looking into how to remove them from their wonderful plastic-y prison and tie them into our board, which will then be screwed into position. The LEDs, just to recap, were selected because:
a) Bright as heck, particularly when it’s already dark at and they pop up suddenly- feel like in the face. Eye balls. Area.
b) Relatively cheap. We’re looking at long strips of LEDs, the kind that end up taped/glued/stapled to truck beds more than the kinds you find on Christmas trees.
Amazon, O’ my, my benevolent god(dess). What would we do without you? Let me count the impossibilities… The above pictured lights are what we’re looking at. Removing them will be a delightful exercise, I imagine… The link takes you to the page. Reviews say they’re bright as all get out, and work really well. There’s enough of them we’ll be able to screw up a couple times too!
Back to the speaker- we’re trying to find one small enough it’ll fit into our design, can be feasibly taken apart, and will emit a clear, non gritty, non ear spearing noise. That noise being a recording, which we’d already discovered would be of a small child or a woman. It would, hopefully, at some point also be able to double as a signal for police help after a particular point. Click it once? You get the recording? Click it repeatedly- would it then call for help? DO you call for help right off the bat? Food for thought!
Until next time, compadres!
Neon Shields
StarPathDesign 
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