Hi there! So I have an issue Im pretty stumped on. I have a tri blade and I thought upgrading my battery to a keeppower continuous 15 amp battery would help my protection circuit on my board from turning itself off. It only happens when I do a color change to the color White. It also happens in Edit menu. I have a crystal and 2 other 10 pixel accents, so I am not sure if that contributes to the issue. Other colors work perfectly even with insane blade styles as long as there not white. I tried 2 other blades that I own which are regular 2 strip blades. They work fine when swinging around my room with the white color. It has turned off in color change mode as well with white but seems to work once I turn it on again cause it saved before protection kicked in on my regular blade. So if I just used my regular blades, I can’t escape the problem of changing to that color if I want to go all Darksaber mode. All my wires seem to be OK. I’m lost here.
What’s your wire gauge for power?
Usually the protection circuit is on the battery. Do you have a backup battery to test out?
Most likely a bad battery, try a different one.
I use 22 AWG for power and lights, everything else is 30 AWG.
I’m guessing the blade is fed from two mosfets (the most common setup) not just one? Even so, I think if I were building a hilt for a tri-strip blade, I would use three fets as a belt and braces as full white with three strips will draw a lot of power. That said, I’m not sure if the fets struggling to keep up would equate to tripped batteries.
Power draw is not as bad as all that with white, at least with 3535 sk6812s. Less than 11a. Two mosfets are plenty.
Haven’t measured with 5050s because nobody makes a narrow enough 5050 strip.
How long is the blade and what strips does it use?
Have you looked at the Tritium quad blade? I was planning to wire it with 3 mosfets, but was worried I’d need four. The tritium blade has ~460 LEDs on a single 82cm/32" strip. I’ve been told it draws 12A at full white (but I don’t know how to calculate the number of mosfets needed). I have it working with 2 on a factory installed chassis but it doesn’t seem to be as bright as it could be.
Theoretically, two FETs should be enough for 12A, but three is probably better.
I’m not really impressed with it. The little side leds fall off if you look at em funny. It’s a shame too because it’s a cool idea.
Aren’t they rated for 15a each?
They may be. Different manufacturers use different FETs.
The design files says to use FETs that can handle at least 10A.
However, I wouldn’t actually recommend pushing the FETs to their rated limits, as that will probably make them quite hot, and proffieboards aren’t big enough to be good at dissipating heat.