Plecter Labs Crystal Focus Saber Core V7.5 User Manual

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

1

Crystal Focus Saber Core™ V7.5

Illuminated Saber Controller Pro – User’s manual

© Erv’ - Plecter Labs – v 7.5

Edition 1.0 - January 2015

[e-mail]

http://www.plecterlabs.com

Important release information

- Board is compatible with FAT and FAT32

- MacOS is supported

- Dual Motion sensor with Motion Fusion™

- Simplified gesture recognition settings

- Improved gesture recognition dynamic range and resolution

- StabFx™, SpinFx™ & ComboFx™

- Color mixing with the FlexiBlend™ engine on 4 channels

- On-the-fly Color profiles change

- Audio output up to 1W/8 ohm or 2W/4 ohm

- LED current up to 3A

- Supports luxeon III, V, rebel (old or new), seoul LEDs, Ledengin, tri-rebels, tri-

Cree, Quads.

We spent a lot of time writing this manual to ensure all the important
information is provided for proper use of that board. If you are new to saber
building, to the use of Crystal Focus boards, or simply to electronics in
general, we highly recommend you print a copy of that document and keep
it with you during the whole process of installing CF in your hilt.

Modification, copies or distribution of that document is strictly prohibited

© Plecter Labs / Erv’ Plecter 2005-2015

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

2

Index

CRYSTAL FOCUS SABER CORE™ V7.5 1

I

MPORTANT RELEASE INFORMATION

1

I

NTRODUCTION

5

High-Power LEDs (aka Luxeon™) 5
Sound section 6
Features & Maximum Ratings 7
Placement & Installation 8

T

OOLS AND PARTS REQUIRED TO INSTALL/OPERATE THE MODULE

9

H

OW DOES IT WORK

? 9

SD

CARD CONTENTS, SOUND BANKS AND SLOTS

10

U

SER’S NOTES

11

B

OARD OVERVIEW

12

G

ETTING STARTED WITH CRYSTAL FOCUS

12

W

IRING AND OPERATING THE MODULE

12

General Power Switch & Recharge Port 13
General wiring 14

U

SER’S NOTES

15

Animated Accent LEDs 16
Calculating resistors for LEDs 16

C

ONFIGURATION FILES

18

T

HE PREFERENCES FILE

19

P

ARAMETERS AND FINE TUNING THE SABER

20

M

OTION & GESTURE DETECTION PARAMETERS

: 20

G

ESTURE TYPES

20

G

ESTURE FLOWS & PRIORITIES

: 21

S

OUND PARAMETERS

: 21

H

IGH-POWER

LED

PARAMETERS

: 25

U

SER'S NOTES

: 26

T

HE SABER OVERDRIVE PROTECTION

27

C

OMBOS

27

C

OLOR PROFILES

28

Profiles definition 28
Profiles vs. standard blade color definition 28
Profiles editing in R.I.C.E. 28
Profiles browsing 29

R

ESONANT CHAMBER

30

B

ROWSING THE SOUND BANKS – REBOOTING THE SABER

30

C

REATING YOUR OWN SOUNDS

31

I

NSTALLING A SOUND FONT ON THE SD CARD

31

A

UDIO PLAYER – ISABER

32

C

LASHES, SWINGS & BLASTER (RANDOM) SELECTION MODES

33

ADVANCED WIRING & USAGE 35

W

IRING A TACTILE FEEDBACK MOTOR AND A PROGRESSIVE POWER ON

LED 35

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

3

W

IRING A GENERAL POWER-ON INDICATOR / ACCENT

LED 37

S

IMPLE FLASH ON CLASH™ / FOC™ EFFECT

(CFV5

LEGACY MODE

) 37

COLOR MIXING 39

P

SEUDO COLOR MIXING (WITHOUT THE COLOR XTENDER™ BOARD

) 39

A

CCURATE COLOR MIXING (USING THE COLOR XTENDER™ BOARD

) 40

U

SING ALL THE 4 COLOR CHANNELS

41

4

CHANNEL WIRING WITH THE CEX (DUAL-CELL RECOMMENDED

) 41

4

CHANNEL WIRING WITHOUT THE CEX (SINGLE-CELL RECOMMENDED

) 41

F

LASH ON CLASH™ MIXING TECHNIQUES

42

O

RIENTATION CONTROL OF THE LOCKUP COLOR

44

A

DD A CRYSTAL CHAMBER TO YOUR SABER

44

U

SING

PWM

DRIVING SIGNALS

44

U

SING THE MAIN DRIVER AND COLOR EXTENDER POWER OUTPUTS

45

CONVERTING THE CRYSTAL FOCUS TO SINGLE CELL USE 46

ACCENT LEDS SEQUENCER 47

S

TAGES & DELAYS

48

D

EEP SLEEP FLASHING

LED 49

A

CCENT

LED

S AS A BARGRAPH : POWER ON/OFF SEQUENCES &

PLI 49

PLI

TIPS & TRICKS

50

S

PECIAL ACCENT MODE FOR

LEDS #5

TO

#8 51

H

ALF DISPLAY / HALF BARGRAPH

51

S

ABER WITH 4 ACCENT

LED

BARGRAPH AND ILLUMINATED CRYSTAL CHAMBER

52

S

ABER WITH 8 ACCENT

LED

S SPLIT OVER

PLI

AND ANIMATED ACCENTS

52

B

ANK MENU SPECIAL SETTINGS

53

B

OOT DIAGNOSTIC & DEBUGGING

54

U

SING

R.I.C.E. 54

U

SING THE BARGRAPH DEBUG

55

“F

ORCE PUSH” EFFECT

56

M

OTION ACTIVATED IGNITION: POWER ON MOVE / POWER ON FORCE

56

I

GNITION SOUND ANGULAR SELECTION

57

M

ULTIPLE POWER-OFF SOUNDS

57

P

RE POWER-ON AND POST POWER-OFF SOUNDS

58

P

OWER SAVING MODES & USAGE SCENARIOS

58

Idle Mode 58
Deep Sleep Mode 58
Scenarios & Usage 59

M

UTE-ON-THE-GO

™ 60

M

UTE-ON-THE-BOOT

™ 60

U

SER’S NOTES

60

USING R.I.C.E.(REAL-TIME INTERNAL CONFIGURATION EDITOR) 61

G

ETTING STARTED WITH

R.I.C.E. 61

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

4

R

EADING THE CURRENT SETTINGS

63

C

HANGING SETTINGS

63

D

ISCARDING SETTINGS

63

S

AVING THE SETTINGS

64

U

SING

R.I.C.E.

AS A DEBUG TOOL

64

C

OLOR SETUP & COLOR MIXING

64

Reference Current 65
Rough color setup 65
Color fine tuning 65
Manual color setup 65
Flash On Clash™ / FoC™ 66
Lockup Color 66
Color mixing specific issues 66

U

SER’S NOTES

67

T

ROUBLESHOOTING &

FAQ 68

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

5

Introduction

Our new Saber Controller Pro is the union of our newest evolution of our saber
sound module and our luxeon driver board that we designed back in 2005. Driven by
a single processor, this module features a perfect synchronization between light and
sound effects with the possibility to setup each effect with parameters stored on our

SD-Config

™ technology. Crystal Focus Saber Core V7 has, of course, a lot of new
features and capabilities compared to V1-V6, including 16 bit sound playback, WAV
format support, and now up to 12 different sound banks, blaster blocking, force push
effects and more!

Warning: You’ve just acquired an electronic board containing parts
sensitive to ESD. Final wiring & assembly is under the responsibility of the
user with the appropriate tools and ESD protection.

If you’re not familiar with ESD, please visit :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_discharge

Plecter Labs can not be held responsible for improper use or assembly of
the Crystal Focus board.

High-Power LEDs (aka Luxeon™)

DIY illuminated sabers have suffered for too long from the lack of a terrific and
impressive blade retraction/ignition effect. EL wire technology did not allow this effect
since it fades in and out in a homogeneous way all along its length, because of the
phosphor composing the wire coating. MR/Hasbro Fx sabers found a workaround by
using a 64 LED strip on a flexible PCB which makes the retraction effect by switching
the LEDs by group of 8 but this setup remains very fragile.
The high-power LED technology allows a realistic ignition/retraction effect of the blade
while keeping it almost empty and therefore not fragile when hit.
To achieve this effect, the high-power LED current must be driven very accurately.
Guided by the special film, the light “climbs” progressively along the polycarbonate
tubing and produces the desired effect.
Moreover, our SMPS high-power LED driver has the key feature of heating much less
compared to other systems, and is really different from the use of a simple resistor or
voltage chopping drivers to power the LED. The driver also maintains the brightness of
the blade whenever the batteries become depleted, which is impossible to obtain with
a resistor.
An additional feature of the luxeon driving section is the configurable generation of a
flickering effect of the blade brightness. It’s a random alteration of the light produced
by the high-power LED suggesting energy variations for a more realistic result which is
pretty close to the sabers seen in the movies. The effect is not a constant pulse but is
more like a “candle effect”. We also added a core pulse effect that can be combined

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

6

with the flickering, providing interesting behaviors of the high-power LED for non
conventional or non-saber related props like an Electric Staff or a Light Whip.

The Plecter Labs high-power LED driver embedded on the Crystal Focus Board can
now drive up to 3A and works with any high power LED featuring a forward voltage
(Vf) lower or equal to 10V. Luxeon, Rebel, Seoul, Prolight, Cree 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 (such as the Luxeon brand LED, which is
mentioned in this document) are

extremely bright

. They are considered

"class 2 lasers"! You should neither look directly to the beam nor point
someone with it when the blade is not attached to the hilt, just like a
powerful lamp or flashlight. Plecter Labs could 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” can be built using a piece of blade
tubing ended with some decorative greeblies.

Sound section

The Plecter Labs sound board is unique. It has been developed with the purpose of
improving the quality of DIY sabers’ sound FX in a significant way. For 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-lose cable, we
opted for a high-end flash memory card in
the SD format (now microSD).
Inserted in a USB card reader like 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.

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

7

Features & Maximum Ratings

- Dimensions: 53x23.5x7.5 mm (with the microSD card).

- Power supply: 5.5 to 11 V / 3.5A (with the High-power LED). 2 li-ion cells

(18650 or 14500) batteries recommended.

- Idle current consumption : 10 mA (deep sleep mode)

- Speaker: 4 to 8 ohm.

- Audio output Power : 2W

- Accent LEDs : 8

- Accent LEDs pad current source : 18 mA max per pad

- On-board PLI

- Blade mirroring accent LEDs

- Handles momentary or latching for blade activation

- Up to 12 selectable sound banks via audio menu

- Blaster Blocking, Force, Force Clash™ and Lockup Fx

- StabFx™, SpinFx™ & ComboFx™

- Blade Flickering & Core pulse Fx

- Blade Shimmering on Clash

- Blaster Sounds

- Up to 4 boot sounds

- Up to 16 swing and 16 clash sounds

- Flash on Clash™ (FoC™)

- Anti Power On / Off technology (A-POP™)

- Blaster Move™

- Power on Force™

- Hilt Angle Ignition Sound Selection

- Mute-on-The-Boot™

- Alternate Power Off sounds (motion vs no motion)

- Configurable Idle mode & power saving timer

- Wake-up on motion with WakeOnMove™

- Motion-triggered Ignition

- 32 stage accent LED sequencer

- Crystal Chamber specials

- WAV file support

- True 16 bit, 22.050 kSamples/sec crystal clear DAC

-

iSaber

Audio Player, up to 99 WAV tracks, play/pause/shuffle

- SD card support: up to 16GB, FAT16 or FAT32. Sandisk brand preferred.

- FlexiBlend™ powered Color Mixing on 4 channels using the satellite board

- Configurable normal blade, FoC & Lockup colors

- Real Time Configuration Editor (R.I.C.E.™)

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

8

Placement & Installation

Ideally, the module is placed in the hilt so that:

- the motion sensor is at 1” or more from the spinning center of the hilt

- the SD card remains easily accessible.

Usually the pommel area is a good choice, however hilts made of 2 halves can have
the board installed in the top side of the saber.
Securing the board can be done using double sided foam tape or a velcro strap.

With this new version, along with Motion Fusion™, board placement in the hilt is less
critical. Smart placement remains important though, to guarantee a proper SD card
access.

Rechargeable battery pack

Motion sensor

µSD Card

Hilt

Foam Tape

Pommel

Hand

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

9

Tools and Parts required to install/operate the module

- an ESD safe soldering station & soldering wire (60/40, 1mm OD or eq.)

- pliers (flat and cutting)

- a Digital Multimeter / DMM (strongly advised, so useful)

- a latching or momentary switch for the blade ignition, and a momentary switch

for the auxiliary switch.

- wire & heat shrink

- rechargeable Batteries

- recharge port (canon 2.1mm socket)

- appropriate Battery charger

- a USB SD card reader accepting micro SD card or a regular SD card reader with

a micro to regular SD card adapter.

- a computer

- a digital audio editor software handling WAV files if you wish to create your

own sound fonts (audacity, for instance).

How does it work?

The two main effects of the saber is the production of a sound when the blade is
cutting the air (swing, producing a sort of Doppler effect) and the impact between two
blades (clash). The motion sensor we use is capable of detecting rotation movement
and shocks. The main difficulty is to make the proper difference between the two
classes of movements. The sensor is digitized by a microcontroller, then analyzed in
real-time and compared to a modelization of clash and swing gestures using low
latency DSP techniques (now down to 6 ms).

The algorithm has many trimming parameters in order to be adjusted to the fighting
style of each user or fighter, and also to each saber hilt design. As a matter of fact,
each saber is unique and various interaction scenarios can be desired. A setup allows
the ability to change the sensitivity of the swing and the clash, depending on
whether the user wants a really verbose saber, or casual sound FX. As the different
versions evolved we improved our gesture recognition algorithms which now have
semi automated parameterization, the user selecting only basic thresholds and the
general sensitivity. Moreover, default settings usually suit most users.

The swing gesture is a rotation of the blade leading it to cut the air at an
average speed. The clash gesture is a sudden shock of the blade on an
obstacle, or a hard shake of the hilt.

The saber setup is located on the SD card which also stores the sounds. A
configuration text file is editable with a simple text editor such a windows notepad.

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

10

SD card contents, Sound Banks and Slots

Sounds are stored in the WAV format (16 bits, 22050 samples per second).
[The previously used RAW format is no longer supported since CFv5]

WAV sound files must comply with the format above or they will be skipped
during the boot, leading to sound gaps or board failure.

Crystal Focus Version has 12 sound banks. This allows storing different “styles” in the
same saber. Each sound bank is stored on the SD card in the sub-directories (or
folders) bank1 to bank12. The contents of a bank is called a Sound Font

In the root directory of the SD card, you’ll find the sound bank selection menu files:

 a sound announcing the bank selection menu (menu.wav)
 a background sound for the menu (menubgnd.wav)

In addition, we are aiming to “skin” the sound board, therefore the root directory also
contains extra sound files played during interaction with the user, during the reboot
process (beep.wav) or provide an audio diagnostic of an action (saving the current

configuration with the R.I.C.E. editor) with ok.wav and cancel.wav.

Important change with CFv7:

The bank selection menu now mixes in real-time the menu background track with the
font description file which is now stored in each bank directory, as font.wav.

The sounds played by the saber are stored into (up to) 12 sub-directories or folders.
During the selection of the sound bank (see further in this document), the latter is
identified with a descriptive sound (font.wav) which can of course be customized.
The user can record their own voice and describe the contents of the sound font/bank
from the simplest manner like saying “bank one” to something really descriptive like
“dark side font”, or by naming the weapon, the character or the font theme.

Each sound bank has 61 sound slots split as below:

 a font/bank description sound (font.wav)
 up to 4 boot sounds (boot[2-4].wav)
 4 power on sounds (poweron.wav to poweron4.wav)
 Power on Force (poweronf.wav)
 2 power off sounds (poweroff.wav and pwroff2.wav)
 continuous humming (hum.wav)
 up to 16 clash sounds (clash1.wav to clash16.wav)
 up to 16 swing sounds (swing1.wav to swing16.wav)
 4 blaster blocking sounds (blaster.wav to blaster4.wav)
 1 blade lockup sound (lockup.wav)
 2 force effect sounds (force.wav and force2.wav)
 up to 4 spin sounds (spin1.wav to spin4.wav)



up to 4 stab sounds (stab1.wav to stab4.wav)

 up to 4 combo sounds (combo1.wav to combo4.wav)

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

11

Optional sounds

Many of the sounds above have a scalable number or can be optional. For instance,
it’s recommended to have at least one boot sound, even if it contains only a few 100
ms of silence if you don’t want to hear it.
However, we have added new (optional) sound slots for in this version of CF.

 Pre-power on sounds (preon1 to 4.wav). Those sounds will be chosen

randomly prior to the ignition power-on sounds. It allows the ability to add any
type of sound (unmixed) prior to powering on the blade. It can be an iconic /
character sound if that matches the saber “theme” or it can be a mechanical
sound highlighting the activation switch, if the sounds are present in the font.
To disable the feature, simply remove the sounds from the sound bank.

 Post-power off sounds (pstoff1 to 4.wav). Same as above, but played at

the end of the power off sound. Essentially these are there to add a quote after
having the saber turned off. While it can be simply tailed to the power off
sound, having it separated provides more flexibility.

When the power supply voltage is applied to the board, it “boots” and plays a little
logo sound to notify the user, just like a digital camera. This little logo makes sure the
Crystal Focus Saber Core started properly and it gives a special identity to the saber
and to the loaded sound font. This sound can be of course customized. If the boot
sound boot.wav is not on the SD card, a little beep is played instead. If you don’t
want any sound when powering the module, create a WAV sound file with 100 ms of
silence. If several boot sounds are present in the sound font, one will be selected
randomly in the available array of sounds.

The important sounds must be all there on the SD card and be named properly
(lower case) to have the module operating properly. Same thing for the configuration
files (.txt). In case of file loss, the original package of sounds and configuration file
are available from Plecter Labs website in the download section. We advise the user to
keep all its sound and configuration files in specific folders on the hard disk on the
computer so that changing the saber’s contents remains easy. Use some explicit
naming of the folders so that you can easily remember what the sound font and
configuration files are doing, for instance [very_sensitive_dark_lord_saber].

User’s Notes

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

12

Board Overview

Getting Started with Crystal Focus

The board has been designed so that the user can enjoy an “out of the box”
experience. The default package of the SD card contains 12 sound banks with ready
made configuration files and accent led sequence files.
The switch parameter is set to 1 by default, which corresponds to a normally
closed (NC) latching switch. This way, the user doesn’t need to hook up a switch
to the board, the open contact on the activation pad tells the boards to start just after
power up, allowing the user to test the board with a minimal soldering job of 6
connections: power supply, speaker, high-power LED.

Further install of the board in the hilt and customization of the CF board will require
the user to change the parameters in the configuration files. Keep in mind that,
especially if this is your first CF, and due to the high configurability of the board, you’ll
spend quite some time on adjusting the parameters to reach the desired look & feel.
The SD card slot should remain accessible during this process and possibly once the
saber is completed too.

Wiring and Operating the Module

The board must be powered with an appropriate battery pack. We highly recommend
the use of good quality li-ion battery packs made of 14500 or 18650 cells and
including protection PCBs. The AW and Panasonic brands make superior quality
batteries while the Ultrafire brand remains a cost effective solution.
Unless you have a convenient way to open the hilt and access the inside of the saber
(Graflex base for instance), we strongly recommend the use of a directly connected
battery pack (with a “recharge port”) vs. removable cells. Moreover, for dueling

High

-

Power

LED Pads

Speaker Pads

Motion Sensor

MCU

Accent LED
Pads

Aux. Switch Ignition Switch

Power Supply
Pads

µSD

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

13

sabers, directly wired battery packs have more reliable connections compared to
spring action battery holders.
A 2-cell li-ion will provide a nominal voltage of 7.4V to the board. The board isn’t
compatible with a 3-cell solution without some modifications of the electronics.
Ni-MH battery packs are simply not recommended since they have a bigger energy
storage/volume ratio and the cost of li-ion cells isn’t an issue anymore.

General Power Switch & Recharge Port

Despite that the CF board has a very low idle current use when the blade is off and
board is in deep sleep mode, long term storage of the hilt on a shelf or display case
requires the electronics to be fully shut off. To avoid the use of an additional general
power switch, we use the recharge port for that very purpose. 2.1mm or 1.3mm
“Canon” sockets are popular choices. Two of those pins are connected internally when
nothing is inserted in the socket. Contact is disrupted when a plug is inserted.
Along the years, the “kill key” technique has been developed: a fake plastic plug is
decorated to look like an actual part of the hilt. When inserted, it cuts the power
supply to the board in the recharge port. Of course, the port recharges the internal
battery pack when an actual charger plug is inserted.

Below, an example of a decorative kill key (July 2010)

The Kill Key must be made out of a non-conductive material (PVC, Nylon, Delrin etc).

Here’s the usual wiring of the recharge port. Please note that not all recharge ports
have the exact same pinout. User must understand the principle of wiring a recharge
port and must be able to identify the different pins of a socket.
The idea is fairly simple: the positive of the battery pack goes to the recharge port
central pin (referred as tip) and then to the positive of the board. It’s not affected by
the kill key. The negative of the battery pack goes to the pin of the recharge port that
is connected to the outer sleeve of the socket. The last pin, referred as switched
negative pin goes to the negative of the board.

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

14

When nothing is inserted in the port, the negative of the battery pack is internally
connected to the switched negative tab, hence powering the board. When a Kill Key is
inserted in the port, the negative of the board is no longer connected to the negative
of the battery pack: the board is fully powered down. When a charger plug is inserted
in the recharge port, the charging voltage is reaching both leads of the battery pack
while the negative of the board is still unconnected from the circuit, preventing
damages to the electronics and ensuring only the battery pack is connected to the
charger for proper charge.
In the previous picture the green-black drawn switched doesn’t need to be wired per
say, it only illustrates the recharge socket internal switch.

General wiring

The board doesn’t need many connections for basic operation. Aside from the
recharge port / power supply detailed above, only a pair of switches, the high power
LED and the speaker are required to be soldered to get 80% of the features the CF
board proposes.

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

15

User’s Notes

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by Disney or Lucasfilm Ltd., Industrial Light
and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

16

Animated Accent LEDs

There are many ways to “pimp” your saber hilt using additional small LEDs further
referred in this document as Accent LEDs.
Crystal Focus features a 32 stage sequencer that allows the user to setup a blinking
animated sequence for up to 8 LEDs. The board outputs 3.3V / 18mA max per accent
LED pad. User must ensure the used accent LEDs have a forward voltage (Vf) lower or
equal to 3.3V.

As a space saver CF embeds the footprints for SMT resistors. The footprint is made for
0402 resistors like Farnell reference # 1357998 (22 ohm value provided as an

example, user must do the math for the actually used accent LEDs – see below). 0603
resistors will also fit and are easier to solder.

To install those resistors on the board, pre-tin one pad only, then grab the resistor
with a pair of sharp tweezers, slide it against the pre-tinned pad, heat up the joint,
wait for it to cool down, then solder the other side of the resistor.

If the user prefers to use classic resistor with leads, the SMT footprint must be
bridged: tin both pads first then add a bit of solder while the soldering iron tip is right
in the middle of the pads. Some stripped wrapping wire or one strand of wire can also
be used to achieve the bridged connection. Another solution is to use 0 ohm straps in
0402 or 0603 package.

On the picture above, the red arrows point to the positive pads of the accent leds, use
small gauge wire to send those signals to the positive of the LEDs. Flat/Ribbon cable
can be very handy for that purpose. Then all negatives of the LEDs return to a single
pad pointed by the blue arrow (ground return). The main negative of the board can
be also used as the accent led ground return.

Calculating resistors for LEDs

R = (Vsupply – Vled) / LedCurrent

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17

In our case, Vsupply is the voltage the board provides to power the accent LEDs, ie

3.3V. The Vled is the forward voltage of the LED, usually referred as Vf in the
datasheet. The led current has to be decided by the user, depending on the
brightness and the maximum rating of the used LED. 5 to15 mA are fairly common for
most accent LEDs.

As an example, let’s consider a 1.6 volt LED (red) at 10 mA
R = (3.3 – 1.6) / 0.01 = 170 ohm ( 150 ohm in the classic E12 resistor series)

Be sure not to drive too much current in the LED (18 mA max). If you wish a good
brightness with a low current, use high efficiency LED (generally coming in a
transparent “crystal” casing).

Please see further in this document for the sequencing of the accent LEDs.

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and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

18

Configuration Files

There are 2 different types of configuration files. One is the config.txt
configuration file which is stored in the sound bank folder and contains font
dependant parameters such as blade color, flash on clash color and timing, flicker
effect. Another configuration file is named override.txt which is located in the root
directory of the card and stores parameters defining the behavior of the saber in
general (sleep mode, switch setup, motion sensing parameters).
That version better separates both types of parameters, some of them having really
no meaning in the font context but only in the hilt context. However, the user can
always decide to have hilt parameters moved to the config.txt of each font to
have them defined per font. A good example is the sleep parameter, which one might
like to have short to enter sleep mode quickly in font A but also want it rather long in
font B to enjoy the idle mode accent LED sequence.
Conversely, a font parameter can be moved to the override.txt file which is the
primary and former use of that configuration file. Any parameter present in that file
(even if also defined in the config.txt) will be overridden.

Both are simple text files which can be edited with windows notepad.
Parameters must all be present in the configuration files otherwise, the module will
use default parameters for the missing parameters.

The text files accept comments on a stand alone line (not mixed with a parameter
line). The comment symbol is the C language double slash ‘//’ as the very first
characters of the line.
CF now also has another style of comments using the Emacs script syntax '##'.

To "comment" has 2 kinds of use. One is to disable a line like in the example below:

## switch=2
switch=1

The other use is to leave a comment or a note to remember something about the
configuration or the soundbank, like in this example.

## beware, current should not exceed 750 mA
led1=700

the double slash '//' comment is now reserved as the single comment exported to the
Real Time Configuration Editor (R.I.C.E.™). Use the // comment to name the
configuration to reflect its "theme" like:

// Bank1 - Novastar sound font

Certain parameters are integers, others are floating point numbers. Format must be
respected: even for a round value like ‘1’ for a floating point parameter, ‘1.0’ has to be
entered.

To modify the file, insert the SD card in the USB card reader, and then browse the
contents with windows file explorer (on

E: for instance). Double-click on file

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and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
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19

config.txt: the notepad opens. You can directly save the file on the SD card. Once
the configuration is over, simply remove the card from the reader after having it
“ejected” (right click on the reader device in windows explorer, contextual menu,
eject). Put the card back in the saber and test your new setup!

Make sure you have no space characters at the beginning of the line, or
between the ‘=’ sign and the value of a parameter.

The preferences file

Since CF v4, another file named prefs.txt is used and stored in the root directory of
the SD card. It stores the latest soundbank used and also now defines the maximum
currents of each color channel to avoid damaging the LED. See further in this
document for more details about LED current maximum settings.

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and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
Owners.

20

Parameters and fine tuning the saber

The configuration file includes a set of parameters dedicated to the sound section of
the controller and the gestural / motion detection (both being linked). A second set of
parameters handles the behavior of the high-power LED. Some parameters influence
both categories, since visual and sound effects are in tight relationship intrinsically. All
parameters are lowercase.

Certain parameters involve time / duration / delay. We tried to normalize
those parameters to a single unit: a multiple of 2ms. Unless otherwise
indicated, that’s what is used to define those timing parameters and it
matches the internal clock of CF. As an example, such a parameter set to
500 is equivalent to 1000 ms or 1 second.

Motion & Gesture detection parameters:

Motion recognition is processed using complex low latency DSP algorithms; however,
most of the parameters used for those are internally computed so the user only has to
setup a few thresholds as high-level parameters.

CF has 4 motion classes: swing, clash, stab and spin. Each class is defined by a
specific threshold (hswing, hclash, hstab and hspin) above which the associated sound
is triggered. Most thresholds are defined between 0 and 1023 for a maximized
accuracy in the motion calculation and for an improved resolution in the motion
settings.

Finally, there’s a motion gate parameter to define the minimum quantity of motion
required to activate the motion engine. This value isn’t critical but can be adjusted in
the case of excess of vibrations due to the proximity of speaker or rumbling motor.

 gate [0-200]: minimum motion quantity required to start the motion

recognition engine. Base value between 15 to 50 works fine (default: 20)

 hswing [0-1023]: swing threshold (120).
 hclash [0-1023]: clash threshold (550).
 hstab [0-1023]: stab threshold (80-200).
 hspin [0-32000]: spin threshold (200-1000).

Gesture types

A swing gesture is a rotation of the hilt. A clash is a general purpose shock occurring
on the blade (or the hilt). A spin detection is engaged after the hilt has gone in
continuous rotation long enough (above, hspin). A stab a horizontal thrust of the hilt
ending with a shock.

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and Magic or any of their associates.All brands and trademarks listed are the exclusive property of their respective
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21

Gesture flows & priorities:

Our gesture analysis is so fast that sounds could be chained one after the other at
light speed! We therefore have to slow down the motion engine because too many
swing sounds played in a short time are not so realistic. For that reason we implement
gesture flow limiters for swing and clash sounds.

Clash sounds generally have the priority over all other sounds except in the following
cases:

- lockup is engaged : no other sound will be triggered until the aux. switch is

released

- a blaster sound is triggered. Swings cannot interrupt it. A clash can interrupt it

if the blaster priority parameter (blastp) is set to 0.

A clash sound can interrupt a swing sound even if the swing flow limiter is engaged
(just after a swing was triggered).
A clash sound cannot interrupt a previously triggered clash sound if the clash flow
limiter is still engaged (delay for triggering another one hasn’t expired).
A swing sound cannot interrupt a previously triggered swing sound if the swing flow
limiter is still engaged (delay for triggering another one hasn’t expired).
A swing sound can never interrupt a clash sound if the clash flow limiter is still
engaged, and whether or not the swing rate limiter is engaged.
If the clash flow limiter has expired, and even if the clash sound is still playing, a
swing sound can interrupt it.

 swing [0-500]: swing rate flow limiter. Delay during which swings cannot be

furthermore triggered.

 clash [0-500]: clash rate flow limiter. Delay during which clashes cannot be

furthermore triggered.

Sound parameters :

 random [0-4]: set the selection mode for reading the clash and swing

sounds. With value 0, random play is active: when a clash or swing occurs, the
sound is randomly chosen in the available slots (up to 16). The motion
detection engine will determine the main axis of the gesture and will pick a
sound either in the first half of the sound set (first axis) or in the second set
(second axis).
With value 1, the sound is played in sequence (slot 1, then 2 etc.). If the user
requires a single sound, simply duplicate 8 times the same sound in the 8 slots.
In this very case, the random flag will have no effect. We’ve added another
mode of sound selection activated by the gesture itself.
With the random mode set to 2, the hardness of a clash or a swing is
measured and scaled from 1 to the max number (n) of clash or swing sounds.
Ordering your sounds from 1 to (n) as well, from soft to hard, and the
measured gesture hardness will pick the corresponding sound! With the
random mode set to 3 we get a random mode that ensures no triggering the