Wondering if this setup would work for through pixel charging?

Sabersense · June 20, 2024, 6:47am

I think you may be making this more complicated than it needs to be. You can achieve blade plug charging without needing to make any wiring modifications to the hilt. All you need to do is make a simple blade plug using a TP4056 charge PCB (pennies from amazon or ebay) and then alter the config file a little bit to make charge mode easy to access (basically another blade preset set to stay ‘live’ without the LED timeout).

This link shows how to build the plug and provides STL files to 3D print the parts, kindly supplied by Baldusi:

Bladeplug Charger. Version 1.0 Sabers

Based on the discussions by @Sabersense and @profezzorn on this thread I decided to make a first version of the charging bladeplug. Apparently TCSS went with doing it in stand way. But my design requires just 1 3D printed piece, and the rest can be made with common blade parts. Caveats Let’s start with some basics: This only works with Plecter Labs/TCSS/ShtockCustomWorx-style NeoPixel connectors. The hilt has to have Battery + wired directly to the NPXL connector and the negative has to only have FETs between them. As such, we have validated this with Proffieboards but I don’t know about the other soundboards. In this implementation I used a particular but pretty popular TP4056 USB-C module for practicality reasons. You could use anything that charges a Lithium-Ion battery. But I can’t stress the need for protection circuits in general. Most lithium ion charging modules depend on current to know when the battery has top off. Thus, it is important to minimize consumption while charging. Since you need the Proffie to stay on, you want to have it detect the blade (I used a 39k resistor) and make a minimal preset with no sound that turn’s off every other blade and element. In my implementation, I chose a module that has OUT lines to feed the neopixel leds off the charger. I’ve tested one charger with one Proffie installed saber with a completely depleted battery, where the board wouldn’t even start up, and the charger worked. I can’t assure that it will work with every board, and may be a different manufacturer of the charging board might not work with a turned off soundboard. But the only test I did, worked. Now, to the particulars of my implementation. Blade Charger V1.0 [BM-ChargingBladePlug-01] I’ve designed it so you can use any piece of blade tube and connector adapter. But, I made my own tube so I could undersized it so it will be a loose fit on every hilt. Some are ridiculously undersized and require a lot of sanding for blades to fit. And since I wanted this to be as universal as possible, I just printed my own. Since I’m assuming that you will print with opaque stock, I added windows for the LEDS. I’ve chosen to just have a 5 strip of 5050 WS2812B 144 px/m, which is what I use to make my blades, but 3535 should work just as well as long as you use 144px/m strip. I decided on 5 elements because I like to cut my blades to 124px and I can do two chargers with what’s left. Since you have to minimize power consumption while charging, I’ve added…

In the design shown, he has added some accent strips inside the charge plug, but you don’t actually need these for it to work. The TP4056 has its own LEDs built in - red for charging, blue for fully charged - so all you need is two wires - TP4056 Batt+ to plug disc + and TP4056 Batt- to plug disc -.

I can send more details when I get home later on, but for now this video clip shows how you would use it: