![]() ![]() Unfortunately, I don't have a ready-made blade to test to see if I just royally screwed up the pixel sticks. I believe it's the pins because the PCB itself still works, so I believe if it is not the blades themselves, it is most likely the hilt-side pins causing some "disconnect" between the hilt and the blade. I believe I may have damaged the hilt-side PCB so that some of the positive, or negative pins aren't making full contact internally, or burned out. When I held the two PCBs together they did shift and cause the saber to cut off, but turning the kill switch off and on restored the saber's function. You're probably thinking, "well you shouldn't have done that", and you're right, but I wasn't thinking at the time. Now, when I did the small test blade, I did the stupid thing of holding the blade target PCB to the hilt-side PCB outside of the saber before building the full size blade, and both sides lit up as expected. I did try changing the config to 2 blades, one for the PCB and the other for the actual blade, but that did not change the blade's behavior. It is coded as having a single blade with the 16 pixels of the Shtok V3 added onto the 122 for the blade (it's the 32" stick), and it is wired that way. I did try changing the config as if it were a V1 pixel stick, which needed to be coded as having 264 pixels, but that changed nothing, except it thought the blade was about twice as long. On the smaller test blade I did use 22 gauge wire for all three (+, -, data), with the same result. The Shtok connector in the hilt lights as expected so I feel that at least the wiring is correct and good up to that point. The full blade uses 22 gauge wire for the positive and negative and a 28 gauge wire for data, the same as on the hilt-side Shtok V3 lit PCB. I have built a smaller test blade from a 7in KR V2 pixel stick and the same thing happens, which leads me to believe that there is something wrong on the hilt side of things. All effects in the style work correctly on the lit side of the blade. As you can see only one side of the blade lights while the other remains dark. This is my recently installed Graflex 2.0 and a KR V2 pixel blade that I put together. Also cheap to make and replace strips if you fry some. Burns out your battery quick but damn is it cool and much less likely to burn out than the pixel sticks. Similar to the tristar from civilized saber and it’s brighter and more insane than the pixel stick. I’ve since been running a tri (3) flexible strip set up. The hilt side has nothing to do with this. I’ve done this very thing before and blew LED’s and the mosfets on my sound board. You likely shorted out one side of stick when you touched the pcbs together and it slipped and reboot the saber. ![]() (You can connect either side doesn’t matter) If one side is screwed and won’t light up like you’re showing here the whole stick is likely bad. Only 3 pads on each side on the bottom of the stick to connect to the blade side pcb. They are all soldered to a single long pcb all the up the tip of the saber. Again, that shouldn't affect the operation since the pads are internally connected. I soldered the positive and negative to their respective pads on one side of the pixel stick, and the data to the data pad on the other side. Not that I think it matters, but I did not use all three pads on one side. ![]() It's actually a bit funny that I may have inadvertently damaged two different pixel sticks in almost the exact same way. Of course, if the LED itself is what's internally damaged the resistors will read fine. I was able to get a reading on the data line resistors on both sides at about 470Ω and readings of about 330Ω on the resistors next to the base LEDs on both sides on both strips. I did discover that I may have had my soldering iron not quite hot enough to get the pads on the pixel stick hot quickly, so I'm wondering if having the 20-40✬ lower temperature iron on the pads for longer may have internally damaged the base LED on the sides that aren't lighting. That makes sense about the PCB being okay since it lights up and one side of the blade lights up. ![]()
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