Ultrasaber made their own implementation: UltraProffie

I’ve just received an email from ultrasabers and in the specs they are listing this:

  • Ease of use: Simple, single button and gesture-controlled on-board settings menu allows you to adjust blade brightness, color, sound, sensitivity, volume, and more straight from the saber without the use of morse code style button presses, or the need for a second button.
  • More in your saber: Easily cycle through 25 preloaded sound & blade color profiles without connecting to a computer, and easily add your own by connecting to our browser based app, up to a total of 99!
  • Smooth swing, tip drag, all-new ignition and deactivation effects, new lockup, blaster block, wall melt, blaster mode, force lightning and so so so much more- all baked right in.
  • Advanced sensitivity controls for every single motion your saber is capable of.
  • Switch your Ultrasaber into Stealth-Mode for around 1/3rd of the power output, to extend your saber’s battery life.
  • No need for a kill-key. UltraProffie features a Deep-Sleep Mode to keep your battery from dying while not in use.
  • Upgraded from a 2watt to a 3watt speaker.
  • Built in USB recharge port on each soundboard.
  • Auto-power-off at timeout and low battery.
  • 100% Compatible with any existing Proffie Profiles.
  • Battle-ready: Between the factory-mounted chassis, protective resin and on-board electrical protections, the UltraProffie soundboard is more reliable for combat than boards soldered on a printed chassis available through other sabersmiths.
  • Better availability: Ultrasabers has taken strides to position ourselves to make those boards. Many other boards on the market are either delayed or slow to release due to semiconductor supply problems. We took measures to avoid such situations.

Have they gone ahead and implemented a 3.7?

It seems to be an independent implementation of Proffie boards plus a fork of the OS.

UltraProffie Lite Guide.pdf (3.7 MB)
UltraProffie Wiring Diagrams.pdf (1.0 MB)
UltraProffie Zero Guide.pdf (3.9 MB)

https://ultraproffie.com/pages/board_files/index.html

“UltraProffie” Dear god.

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To be clear; I have absolutely no idea what they did.
They haven’t communicated with me regarding this at all.

Interesting tidbit in the manual, they are using a STM32L431
That part is similar to the V2 cpu (STM32L433), but has no USB port.

It’s quite clear from the docs that this is their own implementation. The lack of USB requires them to use that huge contraption. And in the tutorial video it states that if you don’t have that adapter you have to solder some JTAG pins, I think I heard.
That also explains how they were able to get the board to deepsleep.
But they have implemented text configs for presets, and are working on the styles. So I do wonder if some of their mods to OS are worth looking into. In any case, it makes an interesting addition to the Proffie environment. I’m quite surprised they did not submit their mods to OS in order to support their board.

They have a fork on github where their changes seem to be available at least.

This is interesting

Indeed, apparently their firmware can re-flash itself from an SD card.
Although I can’t seem to find the source for their arduino plugin anywhere…

I believe this is it: https://ultraproffie.com/package_ultraproffie_index.json

Found on this page in the “how to install” section: https://github.com/RSX-Engineering/ProffieOSx/wiki

That’s the package manager URL, not the source.

Is the contents of one of these tar balls not what you’re after?

  "name": "arm-none-eabi-gcc",
		    "version": "9-2020-q2-update",
		    "systems": [
			{
			    "host": "aarch64-linux-gnu",
			    "url": "https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/downloads/gnu-rm/9-2020q2/gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2020-q2-update-aarch64-linux.tar.bz2",
			    "archiveFileName": "gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2020-q2-update-aarch64-linux.tar.bz2",
			    "checksum": "SHA-256:1f4165c25e2cff80e29870f409862487ba470afd436e245ba3c743108e17b8ac",
			    "size": "152221158"
			},
			{
			    "host": "x86_64-apple-darwin",
			    "url": "https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/downloads/gnu-rm/9-2020q2/gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2020-q2-update-mac.tar.bz2",
			    "archiveFileName": "gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2020-q2-update-mac.tar.bz2",
			    "checksum": "SHA-256:bbb9b87e442b426eca3148fa74705c66b49a63f148902a0ea46f676ec24f9ac6",
			    "size": "142999997"
			},
			{
			    "host": "x86_64-pc-linux-gnu",
			    "url": "https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/downloads/gnu-rm/9-2020q2/gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2020-q2-update-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2",
			    "archiveFileName": "gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2020-q2-update-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2",
			    "checksum": "SHA-256:5adc2ee03904571c2de79d5cfc0f7fe2a5c5f54f44da5b645c17ee57b217f11f",
			    "size": "140360119"
			},
			{
			    "host": "i686-mingw32",
			    "url": "https://fredrik.hubbe.net/lightsaber/gcc/gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2020-q2-update-win32.zip",
			    "archiveFileName": "gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2020-q2-update-win32.zip",
			    "checksum": "SHA-256:46cd2e7caeb73daa09acfb9a69df059cf4a27bb45434125afe533ffbace0dc0f",
			    "size": "182770344"
			}

You’re almost right actually. :slight_smile:
These particular URLs only contain binaries, but there is a url a little higher up in the file which contains the actual plugin, and it contains both binaries needed, and the source. Not sure why I didn’t think of that, but at least now I can see what changes they made.

They moved most of the file-reading code to RAM so that they can use it to re-program the board from the SD card. Not badly done, but I wonder how much RAM it takes up?

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Something similar to this brainstorm?
https://crucible.hubbe.net/t/crazy-idea-of-the-day-on-saber-program-programming/2802

Very similar.

Just saying, I made the first “Ultra Ultrasaber” with Proffie in December 2018!!

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My first saber which I bought in 2018 was an Ultrasabers Prophecy v3. I went for the top of the range Diamond board 'cos I knew I was only ever going to buy one saber so I wanted a good one! :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: (So many ironies in that sentence! LOL! :rofl: ). I’ve left it completely stock as it’s a nice reminder of just how far the tech has come and how much better the alternatives are! :slight_smile: Still like the actual hilt though. :slight_smile:

Hello worlds!

This is Marius from RSX Engineering, we’re the company that makes this ProffieOS-powered lightsaber control board for UltraSabers. The board itself is indeed an independent implementation and, unlike Proffieboard, the hardware design is proprietary. It comes in two flavors: “Zero” with single-font internal memory, support for a single Pixel blade and 2 LED channels, and “Lite” with removable SD card, 2 pixel blades and 4 LED channels. None of them directly supports USB, so configuration and firmware upgrade can only be accomplished with an external USB-UART converter, or through the SD Card.

The firmware that powers this new line of boards is mostly ProffieOS, and of course it is all open source. Our fork from ProffieOS, which we’re calling “ProffieOSx”, comes with some alterations required by the different hardware and by the desire to bring the saber interactions more inline with what UltraSabers customers are used to, which meant to setup everything through software interfaces and on-board controls, but not through code. So we extended file-based configuration and the serial interface, added a new type of on-board menu and a new prop. With those and many other smaller changes we diverged from ProffieOS to the point that a merge of our fork with the main OS is no longer feasible, but there’s still plenty interoperability between the two ecosystems:

  • content is compatible - sound fonts and style codes that work with ProffieOS will work with OSx as well
  • ProffieOSx can run on Proffieboard
  • UltraProffie can run plain ProffieOS (kinda - there are still some hardware-imposed alterations)

Most relevant resources are referenced on ultraproffie.com, which also serves as the software interface for board configuration. There you can find technical documents, video tutorials and the files needed to run OSx on any board. Recently we also updated our Wiki with some in-depth technical documentation covering hardware architecture and OSx alterations - still incomplete but work in progress - so if anyone wishes to understand more about what we made different, this is a good place to start. And we’re gonna stay active on this forum so we can answer all your questions.

I’ve been having a conversation with Hubbe over the past days and it looks like we’re not gonna bite each other’s heads just yet, but instead we’re gonna try to work together towards bringing the best of all worlds to the entire ever-growing Proffie community. We explored some ideas, which will eventually come out as threads on this forum, and I’m sure good things can come out of it. OSx is still based on v6.7 so behind the main OS, and this is something we’ll have to address before making feature transfer practical, but we’re gonna get there. Meanwhile… here we are!

Marius.

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So you take the “Proffie” name and code and slap it on a proprietary board without ever once consulting the creator and namesake or the community, then only after he reaches out to you do you come here?

Sorry not buying it. Everything you’ve done to this point is “Ultra” SKETCHY and this BS about voiding a warranty if a user makes changes on their own is counter to what this community and Open Source is about.

You’re already running with 2 strikes in my book, creating a username and making a post doesn’t make you part of this community, its your actions that do. Thus far your actions have already told me everything I need to know about you and your company.

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