Wiring a puck!

[Wu-Li Ruwashii]

well.... I have to admit i'm baffled. last night i soldered all the connections and wrapped everything in the heatshrink tubing and everything seemed ok. I posted some pics in the mhs section of these forums.

the saber seemed to functioning well but was not as bright as i thought it could be, so i put my battery on the charger this morning before leaving for work. i get home today and plug in the battery and here we go again. the battery gets really hot, really fast.

i take everything out of the hilt-- led, battery, all wiring, puck, switch, the works. i wait till the battery is cool again and plug it in and before i even turn the saber on, the battery is way hot. how can there be a short if everything is outta the hilt and not making contact with any suface that conducts electricity?

[Ghostbat]

well.... I have to admit i'm baffled. last night i soldered all the connections and wrapped everything in the heatshrink tubing and everything seemed ok. I posted some pics in the mhs section of these forums.

the saber seemed to functioning well but was not as bright as i thought it could be, so i put my battery on the charger this morning before leaving for work. i get home today and plug in the battery and here we go again. the battery gets really hot, really fast.

i take everything out of the hilt-- led, battery, all wiring, puck, switch, the works. i wait till the battery is cool again and plug it in and before i even turn the saber on, the battery is way hot. how can there be a short if everything is outta the hilt and not making contact with any suface that conducts electricity?

It sounds like the short is in the circuit itself, look to make sure anywhere two wires connect a component to another that they haven't been pushed together or that a drop of solder hasn't bridged them.

I had a battery literally explode in my face when a tiny ball of solder bridged the positive terminal and the case, it doesn't take much.

[Strydur]

Can you post some pics with everything out of the hilt?

[Ghostbat]

Rereading your description made me think of one of my all time stupidest electrical moments.

Did you clip the excess wires off the puck, and when you did was the circuit powered?

Another battery blowup (this time thankfully less literally) I had was when I cut simultaneously through a hot wire and a ground wire when removing an extraneous object from a circuit-bent toy. The time the clippers bridged the two was enough to cook the whole thing.

[Kamurah]

I don't mean to hijack this thread....but I had a bad scare last night...very similar to the events in this thread...except that it was due solely to my own stupidity.

I was trying to fashion a charge port 'dummy' plug for my CF board. (anyone not familiar with Erv's board, it will draw current even with the saber off unless you plug the recharge port....which acts as an overall power switch). I was attempting to do this by using a real recharge plug that was not connected to any wires.

Well...to cut down on the bulk of the plug, I used a dremel to saw off the excess. When I did...I separated the inner sleeve from the outer sleeve, and the inner sleeve fell out of the plug.

Before I realized I had dorked it up...I plugged in the dummy plug and....yep ....you guessed it..... MELTED my frickin battery pack as the '+' and '-' were bridged from my homemade plug.

What a doofus.

So I had to trek out at 830 pm to go get another battery holder and new batteries. Got it back home, resoldered / heatshrinked everything and charged it up....

Luckily I didn't damage any of the electronics, but MAN...what an "OH NO" moment that was.

Almost ruined my halloween

[Novastar]

I hear ya, Kamurah... Li-Ion cells w/ the protective PCB have saved my butt on that sort of thing several times when I was first learning about charging/ports, etc.

[Wu-Li Ruwashii]

here are some pics. i thought it was all pretty straight forward but for all i know i might be be completely misguided. oh well, that's why it's good to put a bunch of heads together. if i need to redo this thing, then a diagram or description of what steps i need to take to correct it would be much appreciated.

[Ghostbat]

Well right off the bat the switch you have there is likely the culprit, with it on power is flowing directly from the positive terminal to the negative bypassing the rest of the circuit.

The good news there is you probably haven't fried the puck.

You want the switch to interrupt the circuit so it would go: Positive terminal to switch, switch to puck, puck to LED. Then LED to puck, puck to negative terminal.

[Do-Clo]

I bet the battery pack gets really hot when you turn the saber off. What you have is a dead short when you turn the switch on.

What you need to do is remove the switch wire from the ground side wire of your battery (Black wire) then cut the positive side wire (red wire) and solder one side of your switch to one red wire and the other side of your switch to the other red wire.

[Ghostbat]

Or Do-Clo could go the whole "Understandable instructions route."

Yes, listen to him, my description, though accurate, contains too many words :)