Best way to modify blade styles for longer blade

Looking to adjust some of the animations meant for a 132/144 long blade for the new Tritium 356 LED blade, since they’re all clunky. Best way to adjust the animations/ignition/retractions?

Is it 356 in series? If not, it may be your SD card. The OS automatically adjusts animations to the blade length, and more than likely the leds are wired in parallel in which case 3 strips verus 2 strips wouldn’t impact animations. If you’re getting lag or choppy animation it is more likely your SD card is too slow or corrupt. You want 1200 kbps and 12 simultaneous audio streams.

Remove this define and upload.

#define DISABLE_DIAGNOSTIC_COMMANDS 

Then hook up to the computer. In Arduino > Tools > Serial Monitor.

Then type

sdtest

If you’re not getting above speed try reformatting or find a better performing card.

It is in series. Guess it’s the same issue as the KR V1 strips of old.

Really? Did you set maxLedsPerStrip at the top of config along with setting proper length in your BladeConfig?

const unsigned int maxLedsPerStrip = 356;

I have this from back when KR did his V1’s which was actually a mistake. Not sure putting so many pixels in Serial is actually a good idea if I’m being honest but it covers what you need to do to adjust styles forcthe most part, although newer styles may need a lot more editing.

And profezzorn has this:

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Yep, actually had to bump it up to 474.

Ok, try the thread I posted then, you’ll have to make different adjustments depending on what styles are used.

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I feel ya. Lotta issues I have with the development of this new blade (no labels on what’s +, -, data so had to go on the website, sending 40" tubes for 32" sticks., etc). That it’s in series hurts it more. It is nice and bright (not too different from the KR but definitely much better at side shadowing).

Have to create a new RebelArmory account because my old one used a Yahoo email I don’t have access to any more haha.

Yeah, not well thought out if I’m being honest. The V1 by KR was actually a PITA to adjust styles for. Personally, I’d get a different blade before dealing with that many pixels in Series, but to each his own.

Yeah, for me I just wanted to try it out. First realization was the ignition was choppy like a Disney saber. I do like the side firing LED’s which turn side shadowing to 0. But that’s about it. Something I hope Tritium fixes.

I’m guessing since this is quadruple the led’s, probably going to have to 8x, 16x a lot of things.

Good luck, there’s probably a lot more adjustments to new styles, since that’s a few years back, so it may turn out to be a headache, but that thread will give you some start points.

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Yeah, although some effects are probably just not going to look right not matter what so it’ll be a lot of trial error.

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Thanks! I’m guessing I’d probably have to do something to for the ignition/retractions as well? That’s probably the most evident issue for now.

It depends, are they Serial “sideways”, because if that’s the case there may not be much you can do if they have side facing LEDs that are in series you’re essentially “filling” a line at a time so the animation will always look clunkier than if the LEDs lit together (parallel) in a line. Localized effects may also look odd, so its definitely not an ideal layout. You may be able to improve to a point but it may still come up short to a normally built blade.

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Seems like it. Very odd design.

Might want to ask about returns, just sayin’

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Would splitting it up with subblades and just running the same style across each help?

I think there is some confusion here (my fault, I should have responded earlier
Most styles do not need to be adjusted when the number of LEDs go up. They automatically scale to the length of the blade. However, there are a few exceptions:

  • FireStyle and Stripes are a “per led” sort of thing and may need to be speeded up if you have more leds.
  • BrownNoise might need a different slope
  • Maybe a few others that I can’t think of right now

Of course, you need to adjust your blade array and maxLedsPerStrip to make long blades work.

Some (large) styles will be pretty janky on long blades though, simply because they take so much time to evaluate. Basically there are two options in that case:

  1. use a simpler style
  2. turn on optimization

I use a little bit of both in my K4 saber, which works fairly well with 513 LEDs in the blade. (And another 46 in the hilt.)

Depends on what the problem is. It will still take twice as as much CPU time, so it might still be slow and janky, but the speed of FireStyle and Stripes won’t need to be adjusted if you do it that way.

I suppose we could make a subblade and/or style which actually doubles the pixels, which would save a lot of cpu time. FSR/DLSS for blades?