Sound problem on 2011 Ultimate FX sound card

[Don Se Wion]

Yep, the board seems to be fine.

One additional test I can suggest is this, but it requires some fancy soldering.

I would take a small wire and solder one end temporarily to the left side of resistor R1 (keeping the board with the LED+/LED- side on your right and the swing sensor on your left). It doesn't need to be a perfect soldering, you just need to keep the wire in place for your test.
The other end should be attached to the base of the TIP42 (or another PNP power transistor); as usual wire the emitter to the battery positive and the collector to the LED positive.
Turn the board on and read the current.
The aim of this test is to verify if your TIP42 is going into saturation state or not.
If you get high current value this way, you can consider following my customization and remove both R1/Q1 using the TIP42 in their place.

[jvidamins]

Yep, the board seems to be fine.

One additional test I can suggest is this, but it requires some fancy soldering.

I would take a small wire and solder one end temporarily to the left side of resistor R1 (keeping the board with the LED+/LED- side on your right and the swing sensor on your left). It doesn't need to be a perfect soldering, you just need to keep the wire in place for your test.
The other end should be attached to the base of the TIP42 (or another PNP power transistor); as usual wire the emitter to the battery positive and the collector to the LED positive.
Turn the board on and read the current.
The aim of this test is to verify if your TIP42 is going into saturation state or not.
If you get high current value this way, you can consider following my customization and remove both R1/Q1 using the TIP42 in their place.

YES!!!!! That did the trick I think! I wired it as you suggested and I'm reading about 1.03 mA. It's not quite the 1200 I was looking for, but I guess it'll have to do. My battery might be a tad rundown also. Unless you have any other recommendations, I'll go ahead and replace the R1 and Q1 with the TIP42.

So the problem was that the board wasn't putting the TIP42 into saturation? Wouldn't this happen with all of these boards, or is mine just special? . I thought I remember reading that Rhyen had already used tones of these boards with TIP42's without a problem. Oh well. If someone can confirm this is true with all boards using 3.7V with TIP42's, I can modify the diagram I created and post it here as an accurate resource for others to use.

[jvidamins]

Ok, hold on a second... after thinking about this a bit, I thought the TIP42 PNP had to be sent into saturation by the board LED -? R1 is part of LED1, which is +, right? Maybe I'm thinking of something wrong... just trying to understand it. I've also tried just connecting the base to LED1, and it works too, but the blade's a bit dimmer. So it's the board LED+ that sends this TIP42 PNP transistor into saturation??? With the emitter to the battery positive and the collector to the LED positive?

[Don Se Wion]

Another lengthy post, but I think the matter needs it.

You are right saying that the TIP42 needs a ground applied to the base to reach saturation.

However, as far as I remember by not having the board here with me now, LED- (or whatever it's called) on the board is always connected to the ground, and using it would create two scenarios from my point of view.

Using LED- for the base and wiring the emitter to the battery positive would cause the blade to turn on as soon as you apply power to the board.
In other words, the blade would be always on even if the board is not ignited.
I never tried to wire it this way though.

Using LED- for the base and wiring the emitter to LED+ would likely work fine, but I consider it a useless solution.
In this setup you won't be able to increase the LED current because the limit would still remain the maximum current provided by the 5 SMD transistors, or one transistor in case you don't wire the 5 pads together.
After all, the 5 LED+ pads are wired directly to the collectors of the 5 SMD transistors, so the TIP42 will give just the same current passing through them.

My solution of replacing R1/Q1 is planned to solve exactly this "problem".

The SMD transistors on the board are PNP and this is confirmed by the fact that the track leading to R1 (and coming from the micro-controller) is kept to battery positive when the board is OFF and is turned to gound when the board goes ON.

This makes possible to bring the signal coming from the R1 track to the TIP42 base to drive it.
Replacing R1 with a jumper is needed to send the TIP42 in saturation, which is not happening if R1 is left in place.

At least, this is what I managed to verify with my tests.

In parallel to this whole discussion, and completely separated, there may be an issue with the battery.
From lots of tests with a different boards and setups, I realized that sometimes the voltage provided by the battery pack is simply not enough to produce a bright blade.

For instance, yesterday I just completed a custom conversion on a Windu 2005, equipping it with a Ledengine RGBW for blue or purple blade, selectable using an additional slider switch.

Since I did not want to do a total rework of the saber, I saved the original battery holder, which is a 6 AA batteries wired in two pairs of 3 for a total of 4,5V with alcalines or 3,6V with NiMh.

With this setup the voltage is too low for the blue and/or green dies, and I had to wire them in parallel to get an acceptable blue blade.
If you want numbers, with 3xNiMh the blue/green pair is absorbing rougly 400 mA and around 500 mA using alcalines.
Replacing the stock battery holder with a 4AA NiMh pack (4.8V) brings the current up to 1000 mA with exactly the same two dies.

The red die is not affected by this problem, likely because it needs less voltage to work.

I believe the reason for this behavior is that when giving high rates of current , the voltage of the batteries seems to drop noticeably.
This is just empirical, but looks like that if the voltage drops under a certain threshold the LEDs are not able to drain enough current to produce a bright blade.

The best suggestion I can give you at this point is to restart from scratch and do a test wiring with just battery and LED.
This way you will know for sure the max current you can get from your battery/LED pair and you can use this level as a target for the tests with the board.

Last but not least, if anyone else had different experiences with this matter, please comment here since it will be really helpful for everyone, including myself.

[jmPlagueis]

I happen to be in the process of deciding what board to put in my (very thin) stunt sabers. I have been following this thread and it has slowly turned into jibberish for a noob like myself. If possible jvidamins, It would be cool if you could post an official diagram for the Vader ultimate FX

[mrknify]

its in demo mode

the reason it repeats is its in demo mode, i've been working on a bypass on my vader 2010b trying to clear this, i'm not using a pnp as it does not need it off of 6v, but i reciently got the beep error and most of the wires broke off, so i have repaired with permanent pins, next is to mount pligs for the blade contacts.

whay i'm working on will just use mopst of the boards own circuitry to run my lux (orange-red) at this time i have a dip in power from straight buckpuck battery.


i've tested my board (as it beeped and stopped working) it seems still good, just broken contacts.(i've repairded)

now i'm just waiting for some time to frankeinstein it up.

2012-06-22 18.30.47.jpghasbro2010b.jpg

[professorcake]

...Last consideration is that if you are planning to use an LED with a single die you can definitely skip this mod and wire the 5 LED+ pads directly to the LED.
If you plan to use multi-die LEDs or RGBW, then you may consider this solution to feed more current to them and avoid burning the tiny SMD transistors on the board.

This is the info i was looking for! To confirm, I can run a Luxeon Rebel directly off the board with the 5 LED pads joined to the positive terminal of the LED, and the grey common negative on the board to the negative terminal on the LED? What would the current be in this config?

[mrknify]

i do not know the current but i have run it off of the 1,2 and b from it and its pretty bright.

(my pic)

[DarkarNights]

This is the info i was looking for! To confirm, I can run a Luxeon Rebel directly off the board with the 5 LED pads joined to the positive terminal of the LED, and the grey common negative on the board to the negative terminal on the LED? What would the current be in this config?

I think your best bet is use a multimeter and measure what your particular board is putting out. Or possibly use a buckpuck between the board and LED to ensure consistent current to the LED?

[professorcake]

yea ive got a buckpuck on the way. ill meter it with/without the buckpuck and post my results