I have experience writing software and modifying electronic devices to meet my needs, and I enjoy it.
I am looking for gear recommendations for a hackable device I can mount on a picatinny rail with a light and or laser and Bluetooth chip and a basic accelerometer chip like cell phones have. Chargeable via USB.
I will use it when I go shooting to time my reaction between a beep and shots fired. All the apps that exist today suck when there’s somebody else with you at the range because the app doesn’t know who shot but an accelerometer attached to my gun would know.
I will use it everyday to create an extra safeguard against leaving my gun at home. The app I will ping my gun via this device over Bluetooth every minute and alarm if the gun is out of range.
If my gun is ever lost, this device can help me find it, incorporating Bluetooth low energy “air tag” technology. At very least it will be able to tell me the last time my gun was near my phone, where it was.
More useful, those few times every couple years that I find myself out in public and realize I’m not armed, the logs in the app can give me certainty that my weapon is simply at home and it has not been stolen from me.
I could configure it to automatically turn on the light and laser when disconnected from charger. There are magnetic USB charging cables which I will use so it will never get tangled in the cable.
After wearing it for a few years and recording accelerometer data I could figure out the maximum G-Force it’s ever experienced on my body and if it exceeds that by a margin then the light should come on automatically.
I could configure it so that pressing the button on the weapon light several times causes my phone to ring to help me find my phone.
The app could notify me when my battery gets below 70% or whatever threshold I want so I have confidence that my battery is never low. I can’t say I have the same confidence with my tlr2…
And if it detects my weapon is fired and I’m not within 100 yards of a range on Google maps, the app could automatically call 911 and display my current address and a reminder for me to shut up and call the USCCA. I might even make an option in the app that after the weapon has been fired it begins making an encrypted video recording for my attorney to review later, and changes my screen lock code to something only the attorney knows or streams it to a service somewhere and wipes my phone. I imagine some departments want to take a copy of everything they can get their hands on after an incident, related or not, legal or not…
It could also detect if my weapon is being handled and cause my phone to notify me if I’m in another room for example in the off chance that somebody touches it while I’m not wearing it.
Perhaps anytime it is connected to the charging cable the accelerometer is continuously recording at high sensitivity. Maybe it would have a Wi-Fi chip as well that would be active while it’s connected to USB. That way it could continuously heartbeat on your home Wi-Fi network even if you’re somewhere else. I never thought I’d want a gun to the MAC address but as long as it has no possibility to interfere with firing properly I envision a number of advantages for the device like this.
In 10 years I could even imagine the device having onboard encrypted video recording. I’m pretty sure there are already picatinny mount dash cams, but I don’t think I want that quite yet.
What do you all think of something like this as a product? What would you pay for one? What kind of hardware exists today that is close to this that I might modify and make an app just for it?
Perhaps I could even make it charging cable they could fit through the barrel and then open breach and you could plug it into the light and know that as long as it’s connected the gun cannot be fired (for those of us with kids).
I don’t like the idea of mechanically locking a gun out of use by putting it in a safe for putting a cable through it. But a tamper-evident alarm would be a nice compromise. Perhaps the charger of this device could have an audible alarm. If my phone isn’t right next to it and somebody disconnects the cable or even touches the gun then it would set off a siren. I imagine that’ll get me in trouble one morning waking up before my spouse if my phone is dead though…
Perhaps instead of a cable it charges by sitting on a base it keeps the grip in a readily accessible and reliable position?
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