HITCH UP YER BRITCHES, IT’S UPDATE TIME!
Man, I thought I went deep last time, this time I went… deeper. Somehow feels like I got less done, too, but it WAS a fair amount. And important stuff. (IMO)
PACK MODS (Late Feb 2024) But first: I messed with my pack recently… I can’t recall why I felt I needed to, but I wanted to fix an issue since the NinaTunes upgrade I installed, which I hadn’t noticed at first. The internal cyclotron LEDs were white instead of red. Bizarre, right? This was pulling off the main board using Pierre Tien’s 4-wire wiring harness with the kit he sells, which intercepts the 4 wire motherboard connector. Somehow it screws up the color code and you get basically shite instead of red. By removing his harness, rewiring the light connector to stick with their original 3 wire setup, and plugging into the relay board NinjaTunes provides specifically for this, my lights are back to red.
That’s it for the actual modding, this round. BUT that led to some experimenting:
Thinking about making the interior cooler, with lighting, I bought the 3D model from Chris Hunt’s DragonWorkshop and printed some quick FDM tests with random filament I had laying around to test size (so pardon the multicolor mess, and the one incomplete print where it ran out mid-print… since I was just testing size I didn’t care). The good news is the main interior surround fits the stock cake just fine!
A friend is going to print these for me in resin, so they’ll be nice and smooth and detailed, and take paint nicely. So I just need lights that work, and fit.
The bad news is the tubes for lights are a lot smaller than I expected AND the lights in my existing light kit are relatively huge… no way they’re going to fit. But fear not, I would have typed all this if that was where it ended.
A big issue is regular “standard” addressable LEDs use a tweaked ordering format for their color codes, and the instructions sent by the HasLab board AND the NinjaTunes board turn them green instead of the red of the originals. TacoBelli experimented a ton and found those one lights, WS-2811 Pixel LEDs, that happen to use the exact same sequence as HasLab (and NT, which copied theirs over, I guess?) that gives the proper red, instead of green like all the others.
A weird coincidence, however, is that Pierre Tran’s wiring harness for the HasLab board, which pulls 4 pin data from the stock HasLab board, and combines it into the signaling feeding the 3 wire LED strands, somehow screws it up, and turns the LEDs white instead of red (or green). But white is exactly what I want! So I am going to be able to use his wiring setup with non-standard LEDs and I should still have white light, instead of green. I can either stick with white, or perhaps get a red Gel and cut it into strips, and get red that way. Or some other similar hack, we’ll see.
The test works! (White!)
Another thing I learned is that these lights are dumb. They just listen for instructions, based on the order that they come in. Take their instructions, and pass it on, until there are no more. (This is why the HasLab board only supports 12 LEDs… they only supplied instructions for 12, so even if you have more, there are no instructions to pass on after #12.). BUT If you wire them in parallel… now there are TWO in the “light #1” position. Both light strands fire in sequence. This doesn’t scale well at all. BUT for a short 12 light sequence light this?
I rigged up a quick test with some extra-thin WS-2811 LED strip lights, and IT WORKS. (Jacked in without the extra harness here, so they’re green)
This will let me put lights in BOTH top and bottom tubes, and they’ll fire in sequence.
More to come on this mod. I need to work out spacing, and am I going to try to find LEDs that are spaced better or get STUPID and cut all 24 apart and solder 3 lines to each (both sides, so 6 per LED means around 150 points to solder, with the extra wiring, yikes) to extend them to an exact custom distance. Research continues…
I believe my Redman motherboard is supposed to come soon (PLEASE???) so I’ll get back into all that when that arrives, and I’ll get into the pack again. And I’ll relocate switches, clean up the snack compartment, etc.
Oh, and one small mod, I’ve ordered a 3” speaker for my pack, and printed a speaker mount I found online:
… so that’ll be a quick easy swap, and give my rumble a little more bass.
I ordered the Dayton 3” speaker, but an aluminum cone one which apparently weight considerably less than their regular 3” one. All these mods are starting to add up, in weight! Especially with the motherboard about to add a couple more pounds, too.
Also: At one point I realized I had missed one brass connector on my pack… the one that hides behind the ribbon cable, with the plain black tube coming from that same hole to inside the pack. That cannot stand, so I bought the real brass (from Charlesworth Dynamics). That’s on the slate for next time, too.
Aaaand, as you can see in the photo above, I somehow missed that the wire-wrap around the wires coming from the flex tube was NOT the screen-accurate reverse wrap stuff, so I’ll take care of that, too. Charlesworth had the good stuff here, too.
And finally, I managed to score an aged section of the real rebreather hose, naturally faded to the accurate aged green instead of the dark green you see some using. At some point I’ll swap out the black hose on my back now, for this stuff.
And last but not least, I got the wire I’ll need to finally replace the wire shroud surrounding the Clippard valve. So that mod is in my future.
Also pictured, above, is 1.5” heat shrink tubing, for my wand ear mods. Which finishes out the future pack stuff and brings us to:
WAND MODS (March 2024) My Ben of Kent metal trigger ring and brass banjos finally arrived from overseas, yay! (Un-modded Spengler wand used for reference, as it was on hand, but I’ll be using all this to mod my 84 wand instead)
The real metal brass banjos are huge improvement over the stock stuff. Bigger, too.
And the metal trigger ring is super sweet, too:
Ben threw in a Perspex tube as well, which turns out to be *identical* to the Haslab one. I had planned to install it, but once I got in there, I decided to instead just save this, in case I need it in the future. Not really any different from the original, so why change it?
I also bought a little kit of resin hat lights and it turns out they came with fresnel lens replacements for the wand box and slo-bio LEDs as well, which I had not realized. Except it turns out they’re not the exact match for the originals, and the exact ones are actually available, so I’ll hold off on installing those.
Step one for the wand mods: INTENSE wand breakdown.
Opened ‘er back up again. This is how it was at the start of this round:
More Hasbro screw plugs got yanked. I pulled the ones out the barrel grip, too.
Disassembled the whole barrel:
… mostly because a main target here is the fake switch nub and hat “light” in the ear at the end, and I wanted to do it without hacking the back of it to hell, even though I’ll be covering it all over with the heat shrink tubing, eventually. That’s a ways off, though, so I needed to be able to close it up normally for now. Screw plugs it is.
Note removing the front handle assembly means cutting off the fake wires between the box and the handle. They cut off easily… I don’t see a way to do this without actually destroying that piece. (Which can be faked again with some actual tape-wrapped wire, stuck back in the same holes, if I want)
I was NOT able to completely split apart the handle, annoyingly. I think it may be glued around the ring at the base? I didn’t want to rick breaking it so I was careful not to open it more than this:
That gave me enough to work with, fortunately. It all needed to be opened like this, because these have to go:
I needed to remove the ears and fake banjos and tips anyway. The front tip trigger piece came off as easily as my past one did (just heat it with a hairdryer and literally peel the dang thing off), but the second banjo will NOT budge. But once the plugs were out and the screws unscrewed, the two halves of the handle could be pushed apart, and you can see why:
There’s a black round thingie attached in there, that just spins!
Once you open the handle enough to remove it, you can see why it was so hard to get out. That piece does NOT unscrew, btw… it’s set in there somehow, and twisting it forcefully just spins it around more.
Fortunately, it’s not actually needed to come off further than it already did, since I’m replacing it with metal.
On the other side of the ear, opening it like this lets you pull out the orange hat top, the PCB-mounted switch, and access where you need to drill to install the REAL switch:
Onto the mods, one thing I wanted to do was put an actual light under the top hat light, and make it a LIGHT, and not a switch. The fake switch would then be a… real switch. (Red capped, unlike the Spengler wand I previously modded)
Recommended to me was pulling power off the “Step LED”, on the flat part below the Clippard valve. I tested my orange LED against the board contacts, and sure enough it lights. Woohoo!
Time passed, and I piggybacked wires off that circuitboard and ran them up the ear. Fun thing I learned about LEDs, naturally after I closed things mostly up: “Forward starting voltage” is a thing, and if the LED specs aren’t exactly in alignment, especially if one has a longer wiring run than the other, they won’t both light. One turns on, the other turns off. Took me a while to work out the issue. Ultimately I solved it by replacing the orange LED in that step / Clipped location (turns out that’s a Hasbro mistake and that one should be milky white anyway!) with a white LED, and a second identical white LED up in the front. The front one goes into the orange hat light anyway, so it didn’t NEED to be orange. And now both work. But wow that was a lot of work to figure out and solve…
Back to the modding, here you can see three orange hats: The upper one is the fake Hasbro one that is NOT a light, but just pushes that button. To the right is the 3D printed one from Ben of Kent. It actually matches the REAL hat light (left-most) from GBFans quite well. But since I had the real one, of course that’s what I’m using.
The SPST pushbutton switch went on as easily as you could hope, just like last time.
The only complication of, well, now I needed to actually solder on the wires cut from the stock switch PCB. Not a lot of room to work in there, and recall you can only open the two halves so far, but still not all that bad. Contacts have to be bent so they’re not deeper than the space.
Next, the hat light dropped in nicely… sort of. It’s smaller than the stock hole, but two drops of superglue and some hot glue later, and it was ready for an LED:
Because disconnects are good, I added a JST connector to the little LED circuitboard:
Test lighting is a success!
But first, because I thought was going to be doing a full barrel swap for the BoK clear tube, I took that entirely down. Located and removed the pin that’s hidden entirely under the white plastic tube (have to look for the tiny white spot UNDER the plastic, in about this position, and go fishing with your drill, opening both sides to get it out!)
Then everything just slides off until you’re at the bare LEDs.
I know some have a preference for the bare LEDs, but looking at then, I was not convinced, and decided I like the white diffusion layer look over them better,
And realizing the BoK tube really is identical, I didn’t see a point to trying to tear off the white sleeve to actually swap them.
I confirmed the BoK trigger ring fits the stock tube perfectly as well. Very nice!
This is the point at which I put things back together, in front, and ran into the road block when I realized that BOTH LEDs were NOT lighting as planned. Troubleshooting ensued, and eventually, I had to swap the stock orange LED in the wand body with a white one (especially since I realized it was supposed to be white anyway!):
AND re-open the front ears, pull out the LED I had just carefully glued in place (*sob*), swap THAT LED for white (but inside the orange plastic hat, it’s still orange), and THEN close up the front. Wheeee!
Moving onto the top hat light (main wand body).
Buuuuut first, I wanted to check out the vent light reflector that I 3D printed.
… Meh?
I coated it with foil:
… and installed it:
… and HATED it:
(Even through it won’t be exactly like this once it better held in place)
BUT I experimented with some flashlight reflectors, and wow, getting the height exactly right to match the stock LED, which is on a twin LED PCB. The space in there is AWKWARD to say the least.
Ultimately I punted, removed the foil reflector material, and just installed it black. It’s… better. Better than looking through the vet holes onto the bare PCB and mess inside. Not great, but better. So it stays for now. I stuck it in with a couple dabs of hot glue, awkwardly dribbled down from above (so hard to get a glue gun inside that cramped space!). I can tear it out later if I get annoyed enough.
Onto the hat light install.
I started by installing the orange hat itself, uncertain if I was going to bother with adding the LED right away. (The struggle with the mismatched LEDs in the front ear took a long time to resolve and took a lot our of me.). I watched an install video by Jono, of gpstar fame, on YouTube. His installed stated that if you still had the clear plastic from the bargraph LED install, you were going to need a spacer to keep the top hat from sticking out too far. I actually kept a potion of the plastic, for structural reasons, so this applied to me.. You can see the L shape, in the “installed it” photo, two up, bending around the “reflector” piece.
I first drilled the top hole, which is smaller. (And required buying a 25/64 drill bit, since I didn’t have one before and wanted that perfect hole on top)
But with the plastic piece in there, it fit really poorly, and didn’t come up nearly enough.
I wonder if the Spengler want and the 84 wand have significantly thicker top panels? Because ultimately, I had to drill a hole in the bracket entirely, so the orange hat was flush against the black plastic top.
Then it fit pretty perfectly.
After that, it was a matter of stealing power from the line feeding the Slo-Bio LED. I used an orange LED, hoping it would match the red Slo-Bio LED’s electrical characteristics better, and thank GOD, it did. No issues with this one, unlike the front ear LED. Maybe because it’s a shortly wiring run? Not sure, but I’ll take it.
THEY ALL LIGHT!!!
At this point, I closed the inside back up. *immense sigh of relief*
OH! I left out one thing. At some point in all this, I managed to accidentally tear off the speaker. WHOOPS! So I added a JST disconnect inline, so next time I’m working inside, I can just remove the damn thing instead of it flopping and dragging all other place while I work. Not pictured.
AND NOW THE TIP:
First installing the banjo onto the ear, drilling into the middle, where the original hole also was. The BoK banjo screw is pretty beefy, so a little drilling is good, so the screw doesn’t force the two halves open. Naturally, the path goes RIGHT into the screw post. So I guess this side won’t have a screw. I can glue it later, and/or fill it with milliput or something, if I feel it needs it. For now, drilling STRAIGHT in, right into where the head of the screw would have been:
The screw crossed that screw hole opening and goes slightly into the other side:
One down! Very nice! I slipped the ring over the tip to decide where to locate the front trigger assembly:
Once I was happy with how it all lined up:
… it’s time to drill, baby, drill! I included the OEM clear tip under the lip of the ring. I figure this way if I decide to extend the clear tube with a short extension (GB1 style), there’s a little material under the lip where I can glue everything together without being seen. Meanwhile, the set screw goes into the main part of the tube, as it should.
It’s best to be cautious, drilling into relatively fragile material that likes to crack under strain. So for the set screw hole, I started with 1/16th bit, moved up to 7/64, that was still a touch tight, so up to 1/8”. Finally, even that seemed a hair tight so I used the a tap to thread the hole, matching the screw itself. Again, you really don’t want to put too much pressure on the hole, especially in thin brittle material.
I’m happy with how it turned out, though!
Last step for this is to get the red tubing into the bottom of the banjo. The red tubing I bought from GBFans was a little large for the holes…
So that’s a tomorrow problem.
LAST MOD OF THE DAY (night?)
Real screws are better than molded plastic pretend screws. So I measured M3 and M4 hex nut screws against the molded ones on the bottom of the wand lining both sides of the rail, and decided M4 is the right size.
So 6 quick drill holes later, and some quick work with my flush cut nippers, I screwed in those M4x8 screws, and that was that.
It’s a little detail, but it makes me happy.
Truly done for the day:
And then it was ...tomorrow? I had messaged BoK before crashing, and when I awoke, Ben had already responded, just saying to drill it slightly bigger. Brass is soft, so go slow and it was very easy.
I need to check some refs to see if writing is on the screen used red tubing. If not, it should come right off with either isopropyl alcohol or perhaps some quick acetone. Or just flip it around to the other side so you don’t see it LOL
Here she is all lit up.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Final note: I tarted up my pack storage trunk a little. Not done yet, but I’m enjoying it so far. (Decor ideas mostly borrowed from the guy on Facebook who recommended the trunk)
Until next time…
(PS please pardon any typos or pure incoherence ... that was a LOT of writing, it's late, and I'm
wiped. Maybe I'll do an editing pass some other time. Meanwhile you get my rough draft LOL)
(Formerly "DarthVader1")
- By GBFans
- By mwilkinson