The Plecter Labs high-power LED driver embedded on the Petit Crouton Board can
now drive up to 2A and works with any high power LED featuring a forward voltage
(Vf) lower or equal to 0V. Luxeon, Rebel, Seoul, Prolight and Ledengin branded LEDs
have been tested successfully. Please note that as we’re writing this manual, we
cannot guarantee the use with ANY kind of high-power LEDs appearing in the market
in the future.
Warning : High-power LEDs (su h as the Luxeon brand LED, whi h is
mentioned in this do ument) are
extremely bright
. They are onsidered
" lass 2 lasers"! You should neither look dire tly to the beam nor point
someone with it when the blade is not atta hed to the hilt, just like a
powerfull lamp or flashlight. Ple ter Labs ould not be held responsible for
any bad use of high-power LEDs.
To avoid injuries and retina damage due to the high brightness of those
high-power LEDs, simple “emitter plugs” an be built using a pie e of blade
tubing ended with some de orative greeblies.
Sound se tion
The Plecter Labs sound board is unique. It has been developed in the purpose of
improving the quality of DIY sabers sound FX in a significant way. During too many
years, sound modules were obtained from sacrificed toys and remained low quality.
Master Replica FX sabers broke the line with better sounds and good dynamics.
However, the low resolution motion sensors used as well as closed electronics made
those boards impossible to adjust in term of sensitivity or sound contents.
We have monitored several attempts for building an embedded sound module playing
custom & changeable sounds, often based on chipcorders. Using bulky parts, those
were often unreliable and hard to fit in a hilt. Not to add those chipcorders were
designed for digital answering machines, and therefore feature a bad restitution
quality (voice sample rate).
Plecter Labs decided to process the internal motion sensors and the sound generation
on the same board which requires some non-volatile memory. Second, we needed a
simple way to upload or download sound contents or configuration of the saber
through a simple and standard way.
To avoid any plugging problem with a
small connector and an easy-to-loose
cable, we opted for a high-end flash
memory card in the SD format (now
microSD).
Inserted in a USB card reader like the
one we sell, the card is seen as a USB
storage key and it takes a few seconds
only to transfer files to or from the
card, on Mac or PC, without the need
of any custom piece of software.
