Four pieces, one chain.
Nothing here is clever for its own sake. Each piece exists because the one before it can't be trusted to reach the next on its own.
The card
An RFID fob carries a balance. Placing it on the station's reader is what arms the station — no card, no targets. Removing it closes the visit and posts what was used.
The station box
A counter board wired to the thrower. It reads the card, releases targets, meters what actually left the machine, and watches the trap's battery. It keeps its own totals, so it is right even when nothing is listening.
The mesh
Each box carries a small LoRa radio. Boxes relay for each other, so a station behind a treeline reaches the office through its neighbours instead of needing line of sight or a cable.
The gateway and console
One radio at the office, on a PC. It serves the console to anything with a browser on your network and writes to the club's existing database.
The cost of a station should be the station.
Wiring a sporting clays course is the reason most ranges never instrument it. A stand two hundred yards into the woods costs a trench, not a counter. TargetTag's stations talk over licence-free LoRa and relay for one another, so the incremental cost of the fiftieth station is the same as the second.
Built for distance, not bandwidth
A scoring call is a handful of bytes. LoRa trades data rate for reach, which is exactly the right trade when the payload is "box 12, hit".
Boxes keep counting when the radio doesn't
Totals live on the counter board. A radio gap delays reporting; it does not lose the count. The console shows a station as offline rather than deleting it, and it comes back with its numbers intact.
A missing message is reported as missing
Scoring messages are numbered, so the gateway can tell the difference between "nothing happened" and "something happened and did not arrive" — and it says which.
In your building.
| Customers, keys, transactions | Your existing TargetTag database on your own SQL Server. TargetTag reads and writes it directly — it is not a copy. |
|---|---|
| Live station state | Held by the gateway PC at the club, alongside a local history file. |
| Counter totals | On the station boards themselves, independent of both. |
| Cloud | Optional. When enabled, the gateway pushes a live view outward for remote access. It is never the system of record. |