The PRIZM Sound Board User's Manual
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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
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an ESD safe soldering station & soldering wire (60/40, 1mm OD or eq.)
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pliers (flat and cutting)
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a Digital Multimeter / DMM (strongly advised, so useful)
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a latching or momentary switch for the blade ignition, and a momentary switch
for the auxiliary switch.
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wire & heat shrink
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rechargeable Batteries
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recharge port (canon 2.1mm socket)
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appropriate Battery charger
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a USB SD card reader accepting micro SD card or a regular SD card reader with
a micro to regular SD card adapter.
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a computer
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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).
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.
