Why would a Proffie v2 be unable to use a 2 button setup?

[MeatySmurf]

Can someone explain why this saber would be unable to use a 2 button setup with a Proffie 2.2? Am I missing something? Or are they just trying to milk an extra $50 out of people?

Installed Hero VeeOne N-Pixel Saber

" The saber comes with V2 proffie board by default, if you choose the V2 version it will be a one button saber due to the limitations of the V2 proffie, all the functionality will be the same as the 2 button version. V3 proffie board selection will come with 2 working buttons ."

[profezzorn]

Weird.
Maybe they just have a large config file, and the two-button version takes more space, so they need the extra memory of the V3 board?

I’m kind of reaching for straws here though… Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

[ryryog25]

Is it possible they’re doing enough stuff that they need to use the button pad? (the saber looks fairly intricate and without a closer inspection that’d be my guess, since the V3 has more pads available thanks to combining things and such)

[profezzorn]

I suppose that’s possible, but it would seem to be easily solvable by using subblade.

[ryryog25]

Yeah, just throwing out a wild guess

[MeatySmurf]

I reached out to Korbanth to ask what the limitations were and this is the response:

“The fet pads can’t be used to drive LEDs when Neo pixels are used so we can’t have 2 LEDs driven and 2 switches as we have 5 connections in the control box, whereas v3 can”

[profezzorn]

This seems a little confusing.

The FET pads can drive LEDs when Neopixels are used.
However, the Data pads cannot.
On the V3, the three “Free” pads can drive leds up to 20mA directly, even if neopixels are used.

I’m thinking that Korbanth meant the data pads, not the FET pads.
I’m guessing the buttons are illiminated, so they need LED driving to add another button?

[MeatySmurf]

From what I can tell, and the information is scarce, it just has 2 LEDs on the control box and a crystal chamber. I believe the buttons are on the side of the box and are not illuminated.

[baldusi]

From ShadowFoil Props himself:

"You can control an accent LED two ways, one is with the Fett’s like any blade to the led negative and led positive to battery positive, the other is with a pwm signal from one of the data pads to the led positive and the led negative to ground. In order to have the LEDs controlled and two switches on five pins we needed to share a ground between the LEDs and the switches.

On the v2 the pwm signal from the data pads has a timer but when you enable neopixel that timer runs at a much higher frequency so the standard pwm for accent LEDs doesn’t function. On v3 the data pads and the free pads have separate timers so you can use data for neopixel and free for pwm"

[profezzorn]

That is almost correct.
The issue isn’t really the frequency. The WS2811 timer is time-shared, which is fine for WS2811 leds, but doesn’t work for PWM signals, which needs the timer 100% of the time.