[quote name=\'clemon79\' date=\'Jan 30 2005, 10:30 PM\']I'd be interesting in knowing how well it works. I would surely drop $75 on a four-player set if it works well.
I'd also be interested in opening up Home Base and getting a look at that circuit board. I bet he builds them himself.
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Well, for one thing the guy ships quickly. I already have mine in hand. It looks like a good, no-frills system.
For one, it's very small. An entire eight-player system was shipped in a 14 x 4 x 4-inch box. The base is 4 x 3 x 1; player units are 3 x 1 x 3/4 each.
Taking a look at the innards, each player appears to have only four resistors and a transistor; the base has a piece of RadioShack-type perfboard (no relation), neatly screwed in place, with a couple of diodes, a couple of transistors, a couple of PLDs, half a dozen resistors, and two yellow gizmos I can't identify (capacities measured in millijoules). It looks like the work of an individual, but one that's pretty darn good at what he does. All soldering appears to have been done by hand, but it ain't flimsy.
On the outside, each player has a button, 7/16" in diameter, and a very bright LED, in a red, 1/4" cylindrical shell. The base has a power button, a buzzer, and a compartment for the lone 9-volt battery that powers the whole thing.
In terms of function, the biggest thing of note is that it's self-resetting. The system is automatically reopened about four seconds after a player signals. The player's LED fades out to illustrate this, a nice touch. (The system is open a small fraction of a second after the LED is completely out.) The reset interval can be manually shortened with two presses of the base's button (effectively turning the system off then back on), but can only be lengthened by turning the system off entirely.
The sound made when a player signals reminds me of a smoke detector, about five beeps over a second and a half, with the last one audibly fizzling out. (The documentation---a 3 x 4 piece of card stock---says this will decrease as the battery wears.) A finger or a piece of tape over the buzzer's opening can muffle the sound well enough to keep my neighbors from shooting me as I experiment with the thing this evening. (Unmuffled, it seems loud enough for most any purpose.)
On the more expansive systems, each "team's" player positions are daisy-chained. Not ideal, but not unfair unless you have more teams playing than the system is designed for. Since any player holding down his button when the system is turned on prevents *anyone* from getting in, I don't recommend this for J!-style games of timing, but it looks great for any pure jump-in game, and all in all, I think any serious game show person should own one.
