Is this still usable in 2025?

[Aaroneisele55]

Hello,

I am a member of a small shooting club in Germany and we have two of the RedDot laser rifle targets (we currently use them with the MiniView display units for training and sometimes connect them to other clubs' DISAG systems at competitions). The issue is that when we do public events, we want to compare the results from people shooting with the laser rifles to those who participate with air guns....

We have a Meyton target system for the air guns but Meyton is incompatible with RedDot targets (of course, because DISAG has their own air gun target system) and there is information missing on these MiniView displays (like for example the "Teiler" values).

That makes it very difficult to rank two people who have the same score (we get 10.9s all the time with the laser rifles) because we can't get more accurate scores without the "Teiler"...

We then found your project and this sounds like the perfect solution for our problem...

We plan to buy a Raspberry Pi and a RS232-to-USB adapter, connect it to the RedDot and the run your software on the Pi.

Is this software still usable in 2025?
Do I have to manually do anything or can I just connect the adapter, install the software and run it like described in the repo?

Best regards
Aaron Eisele

[DaSpors]

Sry or the late response, just did not receive any notification for whatever reason.

For the issue:
We still use it in our shooting range but currently only for the kids competitions. In fact my thought were to have a central server that manages and collects data from multiple targets, combines it with given shooters and sends ist to different consumers. Those may be simple displays for the shooter himself or the admin backend (some guy teaching the kids).
I always had the idea of a scoring board that shows the current top 10 or the results of the current shooters or something like that.

Perhaps the Meyton can be integrated by just implementing the connection and converting the results to the same format as the reddot uses. The other way round you may use the current reddot connections to get the shot-values (inluding the "teiler") and send them to the Meyton interface (if present).

Perhaps we can stay in contact to get things up? I'd like to get some help in development as currently I'm kind of the lone ranger ;)

Edit: Forgot to mention, that this repo contain a quite old implementation when we just owned one RedDot target. There's a never implementation with separated client-server architecture over here: https://github.com/DaSpors/shrange

[Aaroneisele55]

Sry or the late response, just did not receive any notification for whatever reason.

For the issue:
We still use it in our shooting range but currently only for the kids competitions. In fact my thought were to have a central server that manages and collects data from multiple targets, combines it with given shooters and sends ist to different consumers. Those may be simple displays for the shooter himself or the admin backend (some guy teaching the kids).
I always had the idea of a scoring board that shows the current top 10 or the results of the current shooters or something like that.

Perhaps the Meyton can be integrated by just implementing the connection and converting the results to the same format as the reddot uses. The other way round you may use the current reddot connections to get the shot-values (inluding the "teiler") and send them to the Meyton interface (if present).

Perhaps we can stay in contact to get things up? I'd like to get some help in development as currently I'm kind of the lone ranger ;)

Edit: Forgot to mention, that this repo contain a quite old implementation when we just owned one RedDot target. There's a never implementation with separated client-server architecture over here: https://github.com/DaSpors/shrange

Thanks for your reply!

Unfortunately, your repo (https://github.com/DaSpors/shrange) throws a 404 from Github for me ("repository not found")...

In our case, the client-server system (at least in hardware) isn't even necessary as we have one screen (and Raspberry Pi) per target anyway and would just manually read the results or the stats....
But what would be great if one Pi could have a dual role (display its own results and function as the server for score boards and stats like best shot, best series of 10, 20, 40 shots and so on) because we have two targets, two Pis for the screens and don't have a central location or a third Pi for the server....

While we don't have the hardware yet, it would be great if you could provide me with some kind of tutorial on what we need (RaspPi (+ SD Card and stuff) + USB Adapters, I assume) and on how to install this so we get the results (including Teiler, average and such stats) of each target onto a screen...

Integrating Meyton (which would mean emulating a Meyton target to get the data onto the Meyton software) would be great to centralise the results and for comparision with air gun shooters. However, that would be another challenge/project of its own as they don't have any official interfaces available.

Meyton is pretty restrictive in general (our shooting club's tech admin told me that they send out technicians with USB sticks to update the systems so they don't even offer any way for us to download updates ourselves) and that could lead to trouble for the one reverse-engineering their protocol....

[DaSpors]

Oh sry, that repo is still private because all docs are missing ;)
For the hardware you are right: Rpi with SD card and a USB-Serial adapter will be enough.
But remember: The RPI using the software in this repo will be kind of a server that connects directly to the reddot target.
It serves a Website that you need to be able to connect to from a "display-computer", which may be a simple tablet.

In our shooting range the RPI provides a WIFI that the tablet connects to. That way there's no active connection to the outside world.
And because of the tricky setup we changed to the client/server based project in the (currently private) shrange repo.
That code can run on a RPI too, plus it connects two (or more) reddots on one RPI.
Tablets can then connect to that and just display the target they are assigned to.

Let me check if I can get some documentation ready and/or open that repo for you.

[Aaroneisele55]

Oh sry, that repo is still private because all docs are missing ;)
For the hardware you are right: Rpi with SD card and a USB-Serial adapter will be enough.
But remember: The RPI using the software in this repo will be kind of a server that connects directly to the reddot target.
It serves a Website that you need to be able to connect to from a "display-computer", which may be a simple tablet.

In our shooting range the RPI provides a WIFI that the tablet connects to. That way there's no active connection to the outside world.
And because of the tricky setup we changed to the client/server based project in the (currently private) shrange repo.
That code can run on a RPI too, plus it connects two (or more) reddots on one RPI.
Tablets can then connect to that and just display the target they are assigned to.

Let me check if I can get some documentation ready and/or open that repo for you.

Thank you, would it also be possible to connect both targets to one of the Pis, let this Pi be the server and also its own client (display for target 1) and then use the other Pi as a display for the second target?

[DaSpors]

Yes, that would be possible too. But we found it cheaper to just buy one RPI headless (no monitor, no keyboard) and two tablets. That comes on total about 300€ and you're done.

[Aaroneisele55]

Yes, that would be possible too. But we found it cheaper to just buy one RPI headless (no monitor, no keyboard) and two tablets. That comes on total about 300€ and you're done.

The thing is that we already have screens for each shooter because of the Meyton targets, and we could then just switch to the second Pis on the screen and wouldn't have to worry about tablets (they have batteries, need a stand or something to place them on and normally have a lower lifespan than a screen + RPI).

So we would only need to buy two new Pis and their accessories (SD card, power supply, maybe a mouse for control)

[Aaroneisele55]

Yes, that would be possible too. But we found it cheaper to just buy one RPI headless (no monitor, no keyboard) and two tablets. That comes on total about 300€ and you're done.

Our admin sent me the link to this adaptor, would that work for your software?
I will propose your approach (one headless pi for the targets) to him, and we would probably also use one Pi as a client for each screen as we already have the screens anyway...

Would it be possible for you to document the shrange software in a way so we know how to set it up?

[DaSpors]

The Adapter should bei fine. Documentation is in Progress, perhaps I can get the setup script working for you, but I need to test it. What Rpi are you going to use?

[Aaroneisele55]

What Rpi are you going to use?

I am not sure on that, I'm definitely not going to use a 5, maybe a 4 or 3B+?

UPDATE:
Would a 3b+ be sufficient for the targets?
Could I also use 3b+s for the screens or are they too underpowered?

[DaSpors]

RPI 3B+ shoulbe be enough. In fact we're using one of those too, serving two targets plus the apache webserver hosting the main application.
For the screens we currently use two very cheap tables, I thing 3B+ can drive Chrome browser, so that will be okay too.

Wir können auch auf Deutsch wechseln, is vielleicht einfacher ;)
Könnten wir einen E-Mail Kontakt oder sowas machen? Wie heißt Euer Klub/Verein?

[Aaroneisele55]

RPI 3B+ shoulbe be enough. In fact we're using one of those too, serving two targets plus the apache webserver hosting the main application.
For the screens we currently use two very cheap tables, I thing 3B+ can drive Chrome browser, so that will be okay too.

Wir können auch auf Deutsch wechseln, is vielleicht einfacher ;)
Könnten wir einen E-Mail Kontakt oder sowas machen? Wie heißt Euer Klub/Verein?

Wir können sehr gerne auf Deutsch wechseln, ich habe lediglich auf Englisch geschrieben, weil ich das von anderen Projekten auf GitHub so gewohnt bin....

Unser Schützenverein ist der KKSV Braunenweiler (ist ein relativ kleiner Verein), ich bin dort allerdings "nur" normales Mitglied mit etwas Erfahrung mit der Standtechnik.
Ich interessiere mich auch außerhalb des Schützenvereins für Raspberry Pis und habe auch selbst einen Pi4 fpr meine Haussteuerung im Einsatz, daher habe ich mir das mal von unserem Admin zeigen lassen...

Wir können auch gerne auf E-Mail wechseln, meine E-Mail ist aaroneisele55@gmail.com