Hey guys
I have been on a bit of a hiatus. But I am back and ready to start my next build. When I last left the mighty was the next big thing and then …well I hear there were some issues there. But a few people were also working on the really bright led strobes for the thrower tip.
In the past I have owned a full Crix setup. But that is all I have ever had. I am looking to really go for it on this one and was just wondering what everybody else is using that just blows them away
Mine’s a mix. I have Crix (Heavy Props) Pack lights and GBfans Gun lights and sound card
I’m biased:
Haha, well of course you are AJ:)
I;ve used the GBFans kit in both my builds… can’t go wrong
The GBFans kit has literally all the bells and whistles. It’s like the Cadillac of light and sound kits.
For me though, I like my Prop-Forge/jackdoud kit with Heavy Props/Crix sound board. I decided on a vanilla GB1 hero pack and the simplicity of these two kits was most welcome.
I’ve played with a few setups and the GBFans is by far the best.
So far I’ve worked with the Crix Wand, pack and light boards, the Jupiter Electronics wand and pack boards and the GBFans whole shebang.
In terms of instillation, GBFans was by far the easiest, thanks largely to the plug & play nature of… well, everything. Besides the speaker and battery, there’s no real need to worry about screw terminals, soldering or buying any extra wire. The ribbon cables to connect everything make it so easy and it’s the easiest wand kit I’ve ever installed.
A lot of my Crix wand lights were pre-wired backwards and I had to clip the lights and resolder them. Elements of wiring with that setup can be a little confusing an the tech support is a bit lacking. I ended up burning out my bar graph lights on the Crix board.
Jupiter kit was a bit of a pain with a lot of soldering and it had no special features to it. The only upside is the way the led’s are installed would make it easy to splice in extra led’s if you wanted to do that for some reason.
GBFans wand lights can already switch TVG fire modes so if you want green slime blower lights in the barrel or boson dart sounds, it’s already there. It also has multiple light modes for the wand and pack (film accurate and special effects).
The GBFans sound kit does not require an amp (Crix does) and good lord it’s so loud. I ran it into its overheat sequence inside a mall once and it was so loud someone thought it was a fire alarm.
The GBFans setup comes with a few different sound banks pre-installed. You have a fun interactive mode where your pack will randomly make Scoleri Bros. or Slimer sounds and you have a few seconds to shoot at them, which will trigger more sounds. It has a TVG sound bank with alternate fire modes (slime blower, Meson collider… things, etc.) and your usual proton stream has a beefier activation sound and a different cooldown sound.
I think the movie accurate sounds on the GBFans kit are a little weak and don’t give the oomph of the TVG sounds but that brings me to the next, and possibly the best, reason to buy the GBFans kits.
Customization!
The shop sells a sound reprogrammer board so you can load your own sounds to the boards like lightsaber enthusiasts have done with their glow sticks for ages. You can theoretically make your pack rip a big ■■■■ every time you turn it on if you want. Which is awesome.
The mighty Spongeface also sells a huge array of brilliant upgrades from white flashbulb-like led’s to simulate the effect from the film to higher powered thrower lights and a kit to make your cyclotron led’s change colors with your wand. He also sells a relay board to easily hook your pack to one of jimfin’s ecig smoke systems to give your pack some seriously awesome effects.
I have 2 packs and both use the full gbfans kits loaded with spongeface upgrades and I’m incredibly pleased with them.
Wow!!!
Thank you Lando System. That is EXACTLY what I wanted to know. I too had the same experience with the Crix board, not putting them down as they are a great board and understandably Chris is a busy man. But help was needed and not there.
I am currently learning on programming Arduino chips. But not quite there yet so it sounds like the GB fans board is the way to go. I was really hoping to run one of these high powered l.e.d sequence bulbs and it sounds like that is now a possibility.
Thank you everyone!
My current pack uses Exoray’s pack and wand electronics. For my new build I plan to go full GBFans, except the sound board, which will be Crix, as I already have it kicking around, and have for some time. No sense replacing an unused, perfectly good sound board.
I’ll comment from the scratch sound/light perspective. If I wasn’t working on two packs at the same time, I would have used the GBfans kit. I was stubborn and wanted to figure out how to do this myself, which was a great learning experience with Arduino but was a pretty steep learning curve. The other issue is that there is a big difference getting things to work on a breadboard vs wiring up everything. The next I build (yeah I know, haven’t finished the first two yet) will be a GBfans kit.