Electronic Boards in markers

[spikeball]

Something I've wondered and my late night mind brought back up again; why does it matter what board is in a marker?
Now I understand the different variations of styles of designs, but what about spools for example? Why can't you just use a board from another spool marker?

Educate me!

[Toestr]

No computer expert by any means, but so long as the board supports the correct range of parameters, it's just an issue of size, mounting and connection.

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[Bennymcpenny]

Common to see angel guys use whatever fits to rig thiers up. I recently fixed an 06 ego with an etek 1 board. I put a g4 board in a g3. The pm5 boards were completely wiped out because they were one of the few guns where the trigger isn't surface mounted to the board.

[glaman5266]

One thing to point out is that some markers have more than one board. One to handle firing modes & general function and one to handle the noid and/or eyes. Obviously this is more common in newer markers.

Could different solenoids be a reason? Different power requirements and/or logic depending on the noid chosen in the design process?
Could also depend on the power source. Different battery, different way the board has to handle it. Unless, of course, you just convert it to use a different battery like people do with Angels.

[spikeball]

Different solenoids I was thinking would be the main thing for a different board.

[flyweightnate]

Ions, in particular, had very power- hungry solenoids

[Jordan]

Two main things to consider, in my experience - will the board be able to reliably fire the solenoid(s), and does the board have the correct dwell parameters for the marker in question to fire correctly.

After that it's the peripherals - eye, microswitch, battery, and noid connectors - that need to considered, as well as physical dimensions and mounting points.

[JonM]

Another factor I'm starting to see is specific to PE markers where the eyes are now soldered directly to the board. So, another board wouldn't work since there aren't any eye wires or holes in the breech to mount them.

[JCC]

I always thought a standard tournament issued circuit board would of been the better way to go then allowing the ramping BS because they could not find a way to stop all the cheater boards. For a gun to be tournament legal would need to take a standard sized board with standardized connections for trigger switch, eyes, noid. You arrive at a major event you let them know your settings for dwell and such. They provide you a board that is not user accessible set to those settings with a RF ID. Start of each game RF ID is confirmed matching to the individual player on field and game begins. End of the event you check your tournament issue board back in for whatever the deposit amount is. Instead we let cheaters change the course of the game. A single mass produced board type would of done wonders on reducing costs of boards as well.

[Shaftski]

I would refuse to use a standardized board like that personally. As an engineer, every board I look at I see ways to improve in some way. Faster, better user interface, better power supply, etc. Also seems NXL has problems getting a simple electronic scoring system to work in recent years. A scoring system is middle school science fair level stuff. I'd never trust an industry body to handle something like that, they don't have it in them.

Mechanically, most electros are pretty similar in their base design, including appearance. Software is they way you distinguish your product when that happens.

Maybe if there was a standardized library posted open source that everyone had to use, this handles firing modes/logic and switch debounce filtering. After that you can cross-compile it for any desired chipset, and add whatever else you want for software features. But you cannot modify the core firing logic, it is GPL protected at that point. Financial penalties come into play if you mess with it and try to make money off it without releasing what you changed.

Biggest problem IMO is you need highly technical individuals inspecting/approving markers on the field. Until that happens, you will always have someone trying to slip something by. It's just too easy to trick non-technical thinkers.

[flyweightnate]

The GPL code is a pretty interesting idea.
The modern electros aren't quite similar enough to be interchangeable, but there's enough commonality. Solenoid design varies widely, though, especially as companies have begun to have theirs made custom. You'd think, though, that there's a way to make a chip that could check trigger actuation against solenoid signal, without taking up much space or power.

[Shaftski]

I meant more that the basic principles of their mechanical operation were pretty much the same. Solenoid gets signal and opens dump valve, stays open for config'd dwell time. Only things varying are solenoid input voltage/current draw and the valve's volumetric rate of flow.

The logic is dirt simple for firing a paintball. Few parameters: dwell, was trigger debounced properly, is ball loaded, have i waited long enough to fire next shot due to ROF limit, is ramp enabled.

I wrote code that handles that myself and fully tested it in about 4 hours. Tiny in footprint, can run on anything that the Arduino IDE can handle so even amateurs can program it easily. I also wrote it so that you can't play games with switch bounces and inflate your ROF. It also takes mechanical reality into account by not letting the logic go above 25bps. Some would say it's a slow board based on the ROF limit, I say it is rule compliant. Boards claiming to run above a certain BPS are allowing switch bounces, and it's highly unethical to do that IMO. They are probably catching a wide bounce pulse on the trigger release and slipping in an shot every now and then.

Lock down the firing logic and a lot of the BS games disappear.