Post by Admin on Feb 17, 2016 23:16:18 GMT -5
Please Welcome the PICO CRUMBLE™ V1
All right, that has been in some chit-chat talking and sweating out for the past few days :lipsrsealed: :angel: :cheesy:
So, I've got some initial demand for a smaller / simple board from JQ Sabers. Though it looks like a way to cut down costs even more, the motivation behind it is really to build a board that can both resists to kids and saber academies (including the British Fencing Academy), and also be more compliant with mass production.
As a result the Pico Crumble™ was born. It aims to keep the sound & motion sensing quality of my other products but with simpler setup and abuse resistant when operated by kids, drunk saber monkeys, saber combat specialists, or artistic fencing teachers.
It keeps the spirit of a saber with sound (and not a stunt) but the saber remains more of a work horse and a teaching tool, and probably less a collector shelf queen with 1138 options to make it the ultimate character saber replica.
SPECS
- *No* SD card, and no changeable font. Haters gonna hate for sure, but that's ok. Simplification went with this option to allows a zero setup but more importantly no mobile parts so that the saber blades can be really smacked with no consequences on the HW.
- 2 font flavors, sith or jedi, 2 AWESOME sound fonts by our very own LORD BLAKO
- To make this possible, the fonts are also reduced / simplified : boot, power on, power off, hum, soft swing, hard swing, soft clash, hard clash
- Differentiation between soft and hard motions are actually based on the motion hardness to keep the experience as natural as possible despite of the reduced sound plurality
- Dimensions : 24x18mm, 4mm thick only
- Designed for Single Cell only (3.7V) like the Nano Biscotte
- 3 channels to be used with a 9W, multi-die, common anode LED, also like the NB, CS and Prizm (works with individual-die LEDs too obviously)
- Flash on Clash™
- 6 fixed color profiles
- Single switch (momentary only)
- Mute-On-The-Go to help with teaching or when you can't help yourself, turning your glorified illuminated stick on in the middle of the night.
- RICE-Edge™ to adjust settings when getting an "off-spec" LED
- same 2W amp as my other boards
- Header friendly (speaker connections at the rear, the rest on the other side)
- 10 bit audio
- same sensitivity, same motion recognition configurability and quality as PC/CS/Prizm with a blade impact anti echo etc.
- clash and swing motion flow limiters
- off delay APOP
- progressive ignition / retraction (of course)
- flicker / shimmer
- adjustable drive to remove the resistor in some cases
- enhanced deep sleep with 11nA consumption (I know you'd expect *PICO* Amp there if you're familiar with the metric system, don't you?). On a 2.6Ah battery, that's 27356 years of shelf time. For some reason, I'm betting the self discharge or natural dusting factor of the cell wil make it last less than this...
- Service menu to allow the color (re)configuration of the saber (read below).
Color Profiles
The goal was to provide an efficient way to get a saber configurable in blade color but not at the expense of spending hours configuring each saber. So, I defined 6 color profiles defined by having a dice either on or off. The Flash on Clash is the remaining di(c)e, so FoC always ends up turning all the dice on, resulting of a whitish flash if a RGB led is used.
In the case of a RGB LED, you'll get:
- Red
- Red+Green
- Green
- Green+Blue
- Blue
- Blue+Red
Service Menu
The service menu isn't really designed for the user but can be. There's no on the fly color changing with switch combos (well there's only one switch) and there shouldn't be any specialties like that provided to a young kid who ends with a color changing saber without understanding why his anakin saber is now purple :huh:
Same for a teacher. It has to be robust.
Therefore, the access to the service menu is a long press (5-6 seconds) on the activator switch when applying power. If the saber was asleep, just press on the switch, otherwise, you need to either use the kill key (if any) or remove the cell.
You get a 3 medium tone beeps => color profile browsing with a beep each time you select. Allows quick reconfiguration of a saber that is red into blue. Not exactly a config menu for the user due to the fact power must be CUT then re applied to allows reconfiguration, however, remains simple enough so that it's a feature, not just a factory / manufacturing thing.
This was motivated by the situation of selling a saber at a booth in a convention and running out of blue saber but still having some red and green in stock. Factory menu allow to change this in a minute with neither soldering nor disassembling available. No quick connector swapping involved neither.
After selecting the color / profile, press for 2-3 seconds to validate, saber will reboot.
Mute-On-The-Go™
In normal operation, keep activator pressed for 2-2.5 seconds : 2 note melody, release switch, blade ignites but saber is silent. Press activator for 600 ms (fixed offdelay), blade goes off and poweroff sound is played, just like on CS / CF (indicates things are back to normal regarding the sound).
RICE-Edge™
It's a card edge access to the RICE port to eventually tune a saber. Defaults work just fine (motion sensing etc) however you can get an LED that goes a bit off-specs (low Forward Voltage).
As there's no color mixing per profile, the board uses Max-drive values : those are used in each profile. If a LED channel requires adjustment, you simply adjust that setting once, it will be reflected in all profiles that have the die on, or during FoC.
You can also adjust motion settings, i, ls, hs, lc, Flicker speed and depth, and pretty much all parameters like on a Nano.
The defaults have the max drive values all set to the max.
Booting - Deep Sleep
The booting process is similar to the Nano. However, when you insert the cell / apply power, the board won't produce any sound. A first press is always required to activated it an get the boot sound. After that, a second press will ignite the saber.
After entering deep sleep, the board will return to that first stage : a press will make it (re)boot. Deep sleep is hit after 5 minutes of inactivity (configurable).
Availability
This board will be accessible to everyone, however, I might take only bulk orders for those, it's not fully decided yet. Retail Price will be around 45€.
For now the MCU factory has issues with their programming probes (not related to my orders, just general problems in the assembly line it seems) so I cannot get a massive order placed to manufacture those, however the rest of the parts is there, including the PCBs. I hope to have that board phased in in January like the rest but I cannot manufacture them right now, which is just fine as I have already much on my plate with the NBv3.
*Courtesty of ERV via plector labs*
