Plecter Labs Petit Crouton V3.5 User Manual

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

Petit Crouton™ V3.5

Middle Range Illuminated Saber Controller

User’s manual

© Erv’ - Plecter Labs – v 3.5

November 2014

[e-mail]

http://www.plecterlabs.com

Important release information

- Board is compatible with FAT and FAT32

- MacOS supported

- Simplified gesture recognition settings

- Improved gesture recognition dynamic range and resolution

- 3 channel Color mixing with the FlexiBlend™ engine

- On-the-fly Color profiles change

- Audio output up to 1.5W/8 ohm or 2W/4 ohm

- LED current up to 2A on the onboard driver, 2 x 1.5A on the Color Extender

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

Cree etc

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 Petit Crouton 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 PC in your hilt.

Modification, copies or distribution of that document is strictly prohibited

© Plecter Labs / Erv’ Plecter 2005-2014

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

PETIT CROUTON™ V3.5 1

I

MPORTANT RELEASE INFORMATION

1

I

NTRODUCTION

4

High-Power LEDs (aka Luxeon™) 4
Sound section 5
Petit Crouton V3 Features & Maximum Ratings 6
Placement & Installation 7

T

OOLS AND PARTS REQUIRED TO INSTALL/OPERATE THE MODULE

8

H

OW DOES IT WORK

? 8

SD

CARD CONTENTS, SOUND BANKS AND SLOTS

9

B

OARD OVERVIEW

10

U

SER’S NOTES

10

G

ETTING STARTED WITH PETIT CROUTON

11

W

IRING AND OPERATING THE MODULE

11

General Power Switch & Recharge Port 11
General wiring 13

U

SER’S NOTES

13

Animated Accent LEDs 14
Calculating resistors for LEDs 14

M

AIN CONFIGURATION FILE

16

P

ARAMETERS AND FINE TUNING THE SABER

17

T

HE "OVERRIDE" CONFIGURATION FILE

21

U

SER'S NOTES

: 21

C

OLOR PROFILES

22

Profiles definition 22
Profiles browsing 22

R

ESONANT CHAMBER

23

B

ROWSING THE SOUND BANKS – REBOOTING THE SABER

23

C

REATING YOUR OWN SOUNDS

23

I

NSTALLING A SOUND FONT ON THE SD CARD

23

ADVANCED WIRING & USAGE 25

W

IRING A TACTILE FEEDBACK MOTOR AND A PROGRESSIVE POWER ON

LED 25

W

IRING A GENERAL POWER-ON INDICATOR / ACCENT

LED 27

S

IMPLE FLASH ON CLASH™ / FOC™ EFFECT

27

COLOR MIXING 29

P

SEUDO COLOR MIXING (WITHOUT THE COLOR XTENDER™ BOARD

) 29

A

CCURATE COLOR MIXING (USING THE COLOR XTENDER™ BOARD

) 29

F

LASH ON CLASH™ MIXING TECHNIQUES

30

A

DD A CRYSTAL CHAMBER TO YOUR SABER

32

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

CONVERTING THE PETIT CROUTON TO SINGLE CELL USE 33

ACCENT LEDS SEQUENCER 34

Stages & Delays 34

D

EEP SLEEP FLASHING

LED 36

FORCE PUSH” EFFECT 37

MUTE ON THE GO™ 38

U

SER’S NOTES

38

USING R.I.C.E.(REAL-TIME INTERNAL CONFIGURATION EDITOR) 39

G

ETTING STARTED WITH

R.I.C.E. 39

R

EADING THE CURRENT SETTINGS

41

C

HANGING SETTINGS

41

D

ISCARDING SETTINGS

41

S

AVING THE SETTINGS

41

U

SING

R.I.C.E.

AS A DEBUG TOOL

41

C

OLOR SETUP & COLOR MIXING

42

Reference Current 42
Rough color setup 43
Color fine tuning 43
Manual color setup 43
Flash On Clash™ / FoC™ 43
Color mixing specific issues 44

U

SER’S NOTES

45

T

ROUBLESHOOTING &

FAQ 46

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

Introduction

This Saber Controller is the union of our evolutive saber sound module and our
luxeon driver board 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.
The Petit Crouton is the little brother of our high-end saber controller Crystal Focus
(CF). The PC version 3 is mostly based on CF v6.5 and features 16 bit sound playback,
WAV format support, up to 6 different sound banks, blaster blocking, force push effect
and more !

Warning : You’ve just acquired an electronic board containing parts
sensitive to ESD. Final wiring & assembly is under 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 Petit Crouton board.

High-Power LEDs (aka Luxeon™)

DIY illuminated sabers have suffered for too long of 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 or a driverless board.
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”.

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

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 10V. 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 (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
powerfull 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 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.

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

Petit Crouton V3 Features & Maximum Ratings

- Dimensions: 51.4x23.5x7.5 mm (with the microSD card).

- Power supply : 5.5 to 11 V / 2.5A (with the High-power LED). 2 li-ion cells

(18650 or 14500) batteries recommended. Compatible with a single cell pack
with a simple hack.

- Idle current consumption : 9 mA (deep sleep mode)

- Speaker: 4 to 8 ohm.

- Audio output Power : 2W

- Accent LEDs : 4

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

- Handles momentary or latching for blade activation

- 3 selectable sound banks via Font Xchange™

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

- Blade Flickering Fx

- Blade Shimmering on Clash

- Blaster Sounds

- Up to 4 boot sounds

- Up to 16 swing and 16 clash sounds

- Up to 6 sound banks

- Flash on Clash™ (FoC™)

- Anti Power Off technology (A-POP™)

- 32 stage accent LED sequencer

- WAV file support

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

- SD card support: up to 16GB (SD & SDHC), FAT16 or FAT32. Sandisk and

Kingston brands preferred.

- FlexiBlend™ powered Color Mixing on 3 channels using the satellite board or

stand alone using a single cell.

- Color profiles changeable in real time

- Configurable normal blade & FoC colors

- Font Protection System

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

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

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 velco strap.

Rechargeable battery pack

Motion sensor

µSD Card

Hilt

Foam Tape

Pommel

Hand

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

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.

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 10 ms in PC v3).

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
then to change the sensitivity to the swing and the clash, depending if the user wants
a really verbose saber, or casual sound FX. Along the different versions 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 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

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]

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

Petit Crouton Version 3.5 can have up to 6 sound banks. This allows storing different
“style” in the same saber. Each sound bank is stored on the SD card in the sub­directories (or folders) bank1 to bank6. The contents of a bank is called a Sound
Font

Each sound bank has 32 sound slots split as below :

 up to 4 boot sound (boot[2-4].wav)
 1 power on sound (poweron.wav)
 1 power off sounds (poweroff.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 sound (blaster.wav to blaster4.wav)
 1 blade lockup sound (lockup.wav)
 1 force effect sounds (force.wav)
 1 color profile transition sound (color.wav)

When the power supply voltage is applied to the board, our board “boots” and plays a
little logo sound to notify the user, just like a digital camera. This little logo makes
sure the Petit Crouton 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.

The 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 losing files, the original package of sounds and configuration file are available
from Plecter Labs on request.. We advice 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].

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

Board Overview

User’s Notes

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 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

Getting Started with Petit Crouton

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 6 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 PC board will require
the user to change the parameters in the configuration files. Keep in mind that,
especially if this is your first PC, 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 that 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 brand makes superior quality batteries while
the Ultrafire 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
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 the PC 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. A pin 2.1 mm “Canon” socket
is a popular choice. Two of those pins are connected 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.

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

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

The Kill Key must be made out of a non-conductive material (PVC, Nylon 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 the 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 and goes to the negative of the board.

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

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

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 so many connections for basic operation. Aside of 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 PC
board proposes.

User’s Notes

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

Animated Accent LEDs

There are many ways to “pimp” your saber hilt using additional small LEDs further
referred in this document as Accent LEDs.
Petit Crouton features a 32 stage sequencer that allows the user to setup a blinking
animated sequence for up to 7 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 PC 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 they 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 can also be used to achieve
the bridged connection.

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

Accent LEDs Resistor Footprints

Accent LEDs PADs

Accent LEDs
Ground Return

Plecter Labs is in no way affiliated, associated, licensed or endorsed by 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

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 serie)

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.