We’ve seen a lot of interesting gadgets at this year’s Consumers Electronic Show, better known as the CES, hosted by the Consumers Electronic Association. Some of them were the PGFs, or the Precision Guided Firearms, manufactured by TrackingPoint, a startup brand based in Austin.
The series of PGFs comprises three distinct types of customized rifles, all of them top notch. They range from a .300 Winchester Magnum with a 22-inch barrel to a staggering .338 Lapua Magnum with a barrel that measures 27 inches in length. They all boast with computerized scopes.
Want to know more? Well, the custom-made PGF is comprised of a modified trigger mechanism with variable weighting, a firearm, hand-loaded match grade rounds and computerized digital tracking scope. In order to be able to shoot with your personal PGF you will need to mark the target on the gun’s scope by using a button near the trigger.
This illuminates your target, a process accomplished by the state of the art laser implemented into the tracking scope. Therefore, the scope is able to estimate an approximate distance between you and your target, alongside other parameters like the age of the barrel, humidity, ambient temperature and many more.
What follows next is a change in the display, revealing the location where the bullet will manage to get to. There’s also an image recognition application that keeps the pip stuck to the target of your choice, the target that you’ve already marked. All you need to do next is to pull the trigger – as you do it, the reticle goes from blue to red, while, during the time the trigger is held down, the shooter needs to position the reticle over the pip of the marked target.
The rifle will then fire, only if the positions of the reticle and the pip coincide though, thanks to an intricate mechanism that ensures the process. The brand itself is able to confirm that the gun won’t fire by itself, being under the complete command of its user. Furthermore, the computerized tracking scope constantly records the visual feed from the optics, featuring nonvolatile storage.
The PGFs also come with small Wi-Fi servers and an iOS app that links with the scope via ad-hoc Wi-Fi network. The same network also streams the display of the scope to the app, making it possible for an assistant to act as a spotter, on his iPhone or iPad. In addition, it allows the user to upload the scopes video recordings to video sharing sites or other social media WebPages, to make your hunt famous.
According to TrackingPoint, the prices of the PGFs will start at $17,000.
[Arstechnica]
