But now that you mention it I think it would be cool to make the board like a large SD card not the mini SD that way you can just clip it into the chassis system instead of all the tedious soldering on the board
If the board was the same size and style of a blade style SD card reader that you can plug into the side of your laptop or computer as if to read an SD card you could do away with the cable USB port on the board and you could simply pull the board out of the reader style connector and put it in another saber. Just an idea.
Making a proffieboard the shape of an SD card is an interesting idea, but it has some pitfalls:
- sd card connectors arenāt built for high current, so it canāt really be used for blade power.
- the shape of SD cards donāt allow for parts on the top/bottom, so there would be a great deal of PCB space dedicated to just acting as a connector.
- I donāt have a way for a proffieboard to act as an SD card (electically) so even if I could physically connect it to a computer that way, Iām not sure how to make any sort of connection happen.
Well maybe as technology keeps advancing it could happen itās just a concept and now itās out there.
I am all for smaller proffies! My biggest limitations with chassis design is not being able to stack a proffie on an 18650 in a .99".
How would the USB port work? I know there are some vertical onesā¦ You can fit a vertical USB C port next to a full set of 7 pogo pins but putting a USB cord down a blade well trying to plug in probably isnāt ideal
For sabers where the pogo pin PCB isnāt very deep, I imagine you could just put the usb cable right in. For hilts where the PCB is a bit deeper, you would need some sort of blade plug with USB pass-through.
This blade plug might be required anyways, as I was thinking that blade plug charging would be the norm for such a board.
Iām not smart enough to know how feasible this is, but itās a very cool idea.
Crazy twist: If the Pogo PCB Proffie was in the blade, it would provide multiple data pins for quad+ blades so they could run independently instead of zig-zag. The USB could be in the base of the blade to allow for programming (plus bluetooth). The single data pin in the rotary connector could be for the power buttonāwith the battery in the hilt running +/- through the other 2 wires in the rotary connector.
Add a full size Proffie in the hilt with an SD card to control the speakers, sound, buttonsāand any crystal chambers or cross-guard NPXLsāand use bluetooth to sync the two Proffie boards. What would be really-really cool-- using Blade-ID to tell the hilt Proffie how to connect to the blade Proffieāthe main blade config could be exclusive to the blade-based Proffie, synched to font presets on the hilt Proffie.
This crazy idea inspired by my frustration with the standard blade connector having only 1 data pinābut I realize that the lack of backward compatibility with existing blades makes this idea impracticalābut I still wish the blade could connect through bluetooth for multiple data channels.
There are easier ways to do this, and you donāt need a proffieboard in the blade to do it.
Iām thinking that you could stick a much smaller/cheaper controller in the blade which could speak multiple protocols, some of which could be much faster than the 800kHz we use today. If we were specifically targeting quad-blades, we could use the same protocol, but at 4x the speed for instance. The proffieboard could just increase the frequency it feeds out data and there you go.
It might be better to use the UART protocol rather than the WS2811 protocol though since that protocol has much better hardware support in existing chips. (And itās also more efficient encoding-wiseā¦)
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That sounds awesome. That would solve the distance and FPS problems of quad (or greater) blades. At 5mm, a 1" blade could easily fit 6 LED strips, all controlled independently. There are some very high drain 21700 batteriesā¦