My Rusalor: You should post this in the electronics section.
Kando: wait there is a section for electronics on the forum?
Rusalor: visibly frustrated with me :
Sometimes the faces make it all worth the trouble. I think her life would be boring without me anyway.
But seriously electronics my what a journey to under take. I am by no means an electrical engineer, but I did stay at holiday in express...and I work with a bunch of them so getting answers is usually pretty easy. I didn't originally want all the stuff that now resides in my kit but... as I tried to increase the habitability of my pack, the complexity became more and more. First it was just a fan and then some lights..and some more lights, and some meters..... Now it is moving into customer circuitry, micro processors, and special effects.
So the point of all this is to perhaps provide an example for others and inspire them to take this on. It is one thing you can do to take a kit from "pretty cool" to "holy crap look at that". If there are questions please ask.
Now I am not going to get to detail brining this post up to date but I will provide some pictures and videos. As I continue to modify this pack I will try to be a bit more detailed.
In the beginning there was a mass of unorginaized and messy wiring. The 24awg was really too small and it was mostly because I salvaged Cat 5 internet cables. the whole thing was difficult but it served the purpose.
What did I learn? Computer fans suck. Actually they don't suck or blow very much at all. Just worthless. There is only one choice and that is a squirrel cage fan. So much more air movement. So I redid it.
this did the trick and looks really messy... I was just glad to have a fan that worked. It is aslo hard to see but near the top there is 12v - 5v converter that provides power to the helmet through a 3.5mm audio jack and cable. I also hooked up an amp meter and voltage meter so I could monitor everything.
Here is a video of this run down.
What did I learn? At this point I found out I was pushing the limits of the wiring I had installed. I also discovered that as the voltage of the battery dropped so did the fan out put. So I installed a voltage converter that allowed me to take 12v and increase it to 14v to get more volume and it will maintain that voltage regardless of battery output..unless its dead. I also discovered I wanted sound so I bought a small $20 bluetooth speaker at walmart and linked it to my phone to play radio chatter.
What did I learn? The speaker last for quite some time but I had to have my cell phone linked to it which constantly drains the cell phone. My kit is also not receptive to having a 6s plus which was not an issue when it was just a 5s. I also hated having to charge yet another item. My wiring was still too small and the way I hooked up my wires to the bottom was problematic for connection since you can't see them when you are connecting them. I also discovered it was annoying not being heard so I needed to add a voice amplifier. The problem is I didn't want to run yet another wire externally so I chopped up my gauntlet to put it all in there. I ended up using a velleman voice amplifing modulator kit. and ran the mic up to the helmet with yet another wire.
Yes I put the speaker in the gauntlet too
I also made the buttons on top that control the voice modulation functional
More later...
