Hey, it's Luke with Out of Darts.
You may notice I’ve got a little friend here.
We wanted to do a little bit of a deep dive on the Worker smart board.
We've been working on some custom PCBs over the past couple of years.
We've had about five different MOSFET boards along with a few
other projects that are in the works -- five or six other boards, actually.
Sadly, the illness really screwed up some of the plans as far as chip
supply -- microcontrollers and even the MOSFETs.
All across the board: anything that's got a chip in it has been a problem.
So, while we're still working on our own boards,
Worker came out with something kind of neat, I have to say.
We've got our second camera rigged here so I can show you the display…
Greg installed this kit, and the kit is essentially one large board with
a whole bunch of MOSFETs on it that can do a variety of different things.
It's also got a number of sensors, including temperature sensors for your motors,
to enable for a heat cut-off [so] that if your flywheels get too
hot, it will essentially cut off power to the flywheels.
Which is a really awesome feature, and I haven't seen anybody do that yet,
so I think that's kind of neat and relatively innovative.
I'm excited to see Worker
kind of go a little bit outside of what has been their standard comfort zone.
They both hired a designer who does other blasters.
This is the [ZWQ] S200.
Apparently, this was done by the same designer who did
the shell design or the entire design for this blaster.
I don't have exact details on that;
a lot of this knowledge is second, third hand, so keep that in mind.
But obviously, we've seen their design language change quite a bit with that designer,
and then they are going a lot farther with the chip.
As you would expect from any good smart board, this converts this fully automatic blaster into
a select-fire blaster with a variable rate of fire and a variable flywheel speed,
all adjustable from this little menu up on top of the blaster.
The install was surprisingly easy after we got some directions from Worker.
Part of the problem was we just started with no directions whatsoever.
You will, however, notice that this menu is not currently in English.
So, Greg used some web app or application to translate this
and try to figure out what the menus meant.
Worker is, by the way, working on an English version of this.
It certainly won't be shipping to the US in Chinese.
That wouldn't do us much good.
I think it's really exciting to see Worker branching
kind of deeper into this smart blaster realm.
One of the cool things about this board is, at least from our understanding, this works
with both the Swordfish, the Dominator, and of course, the Worker Phoenix 2.0.
I imagine you could probably also make it work with the Worker Phoenix 1.0.
However, I don't know how you'd fit everything inside
since this kit included some extra external parts, such as this
hot taller top rail that's got the buttons on the side of it for selecting your mode.
One other fun feature is you can put a password on your blaster.
That is another thing I have not seen done yet.
It's currently not password protected yet (Greg’s shaking his head)
So, we don't have a password in there now, but you've got a lot of options.
So, from the start, we've got an LCD that's obviously facing towards
the right-handed operator's side.
I think for left-handed, this is going to end up upside down more often than not.
Scratch that!
I've been informed that this display can actually go in both directions.
So, if you're left-handed and need to look at the blaster this way,
you're not going to have a problem with that at all.
Which is good.
I initially thought that this was sort of keyed in one direction, but now, looking at it’s very
obviously got these little indents on both sides, so it is symmetrical, which is nice.
We've got a power switch which turns our blaster on.
We get a nice little splash logo from Worker, and there we can see our options.
Up front, we have two preset mode buttons.
These toggle between two presets, which you can set a variety of different settings
to essentially two different positions here and two different positions here.
Greg set this up for me currently so that
this left switch is essentially just changing the firing mode.
So, you can see we're going from full auto (which
is six little dart icons) to two dart icons (so that's a two-shot burst).
This switch on the right side of the blaster is currently set to change
the percentage of flywheel speed so you can see we go from 80% to 100% flywheel speed.
This could be really useful in a situation where maybe you're playing with kids,
and you don't want to hit someone as hard closer up, but you want to dial all the way up to
100%, which in our chronograph is generally over 150 FPS on this blaster.
Down here at the bottom, you can see we've got two
temperature readouts those are the flywheel and pusher motor temps.
The thermistor, just like on a 3D printer, is attached to those motors, and I think that is
one of the more unique things I’ve seen.
Obviously, that's done in drones and a variety of other industrial applications,
but I don't think I’ve seen that done in a flywheel blaster yet, so that's pretty cool.
But let's dive in and change some settings here since I haven't actually done this myself.
Since this is all in Chinese, you're not going to be able to understand the majority of this
unless you speak Chinese yourself, that is.
We have translated this, and we will post this as well in the description just for people that
want to see it, but keep in mind when this kit and this blaster with the kit hit the states
officially and are available on our shop, they'll be available in English.
So, this is the first menu (menu number one).
This is our blaster selection for two types of blasters.
We are assuming that this is
fully automatic blasters with an electronic pusher and semi-automatic blasters.
If we go back from there, we go down to the second menu.
The second menu gives us three options:
The first one is our delay so we can change whether there's a delay on or off.
The next one is our delay time.
So, this is set in milliseconds for how long you want the pusher to wait before
pushing the dart while the flywheels come up to speed.
So, if you're playing at a lower FPS,
you could reduce this down to almost nothing, and if you're at higher, you
might want to wait till your flywheels get up to full speed to get that maximum performance.
What did I just do?
-Turn it off! Turn it off!
-What‽
So “gear A” here is for setting the function of this switch on the side here.
It's this one, I believe.
So, once we select in there, we've got six options.
We've got our flywheel voltage which is essentially how fast
the flywheels are spinning, and these are presets.
We've got the low-speed quick start switch which we do not know what this means.
It defaults to off, and I assume it might be some sort of idling, but we're not entirely sure
as to what that actually is.
The third one is the low-speed quick start time, and that's just a delay in milliseconds.
Oh, gotta keep… this is hard to do on-camera.
Option four here is motor braking which again is just for the flywheels on this setting.
Option five, we've got the brake time which is how fast it will motor brake.
(The more motor braking you do, the more heat you're going to cause; something to keep in mind).
And then this last option: option six
is the brake voltage which is a percentage of voltage. I’m not entirely sure how that works.
In switch number B, you're gonna see all the same
settings that we just went through but for the other switch [position].
Switch number b(!)
You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to
try to tell someone else what something does without knowing anything that's on screen.
We are working with Worker.
We’re going to send them our translations cleaned up
in ways that make sense for our current understanding,
and hopefully, that'll mean that the final English version of this will be fairly solid.
Menu four is going to give us the burst modes.
Both of these two are going to be the same but for the two different presets.
When I go into here, we're gonna see what we believe is:
auto, single, two shot burst, three-shot burst, four-shot burst, five-shot burst.
We played on two-shot burst over the weekend with the blaster, and I found that to be really nice.
Just a nice “dut-dut” each time you pull the trigger.
Obviously, you can customize this to your play style and
change them on the fly with your two presets.
So, I think that's pretty sweet overall.
Menu number two here is just for the other preset. That's going to be the same repeat of that.
Menu number five gives us our password access which is pretty cool.
So, if I would stop backing out, I would actually get to go set my password.
Maybe.
Option number one will enable the password, so it's a yes or no.
I'm actually going to go ahead and change that to what I think is yes, and we'll go back.
Then option two should be actually setting the password.
Ooh?
How does this work?
Up and down, I assume?
Did I just commit that? No, I went back.
I don't know, okay.
So, we're going to set this…
We're going to 2022
with two zeros after.
Don't come steal my Phoenix(!)
Then we'll go back; I assume that will commit.
-Nope.
Is there more to commit?
Someone who can read Chinese is probably laughing
in the comments because this is probably requesting the old password.
What is the password I need to put in, Greg?
-1-0-0-0-0-0.
-No!
I gotta stop…
Okay, so one all zeros to go forward all the way.
Okay, now it's asking…
This is probably my new password.
So, let's just keep it simple let's do two and all zeros,
and we'll go all the way forward, and that should set our password.
-Did you confirm?
-Let's assume that worked.
Let's find out by turning the blaster off.
Hopefully… I think I confirmed.
Let's see if it asks for a password right at startup.
Nope(!)
Anyway, there's a way to change the password here.
We did have it set, and he literally locked me out of my own blaster, which was fairly funny.
I also think that's kind of nice when people like to pick up random stuff
that's not theirs at certain events; this would keep you safe from those.
Option six is apparently a fingerprint sensor.
We're only reading the translations, so we don't actually know…
Oh, it's asking for the password.
I need the password just to change anything in here.
Then I get access to what we believe is: turn on fingerprint (which I’m not going
to do because we don't want to do that), add fingerprint, and remove fingerprint.
As someone who uses a fingerprint on my computer all day long, every day, I love this idea.
Just being able to unlock this.
What a cool feature, but we don't know anything about whether the fingerprint sensor is going
to be available at launch, whether it's included, or if it's an extra thing.
Menu 7 here is temperature protection, so you can set your flywheel temperature protection to a
specific temperature, and you can set your pusher temperature protection to a specific temperature.
Then finally, option eight is just version information.
So, this is when it was last updated and what version we're on.
Apparently, we're on 2.0.0.
I love the idea that Worker might be updating this and improving it over time,
adding more features more modules.
The board itself is extremely robust.
I've never seen so many MOSFETs on a single board.
Presumably, that's because they are making sure that it can
do a full H-bridge for six motors on the pusher.
That's probably the most challenging part as far as thermal management here.
So, a quick little firing demo…
We did get to play with this at an actual game.
Both Perry and I ran it for a round -- or part of a round, I should say,
because unfortunately, we only brought with us two angled mags that weekend,
and it made it a little difficult to compete when you have to scavenge really quickly.
But right now, I’ve got this set to the 100%, so this is full power with a 150-millisecond delay,
and I’m gonna do just the two-shot burst first.
Feels quite good quite snappy.
Then I’ll go ahead and bump that over to full auto.
Now, if you haven't noticed already, that
was exceptionally faster compared to the original version of this blaster.
The reason is they replaced the gearbox with a plastic gearbox that has a higher gear ratio…
I meant lower!
Lower gear ratio!
I would have loved to have seen that stay metal,
but I’m going to assume that the plastic one is hopefully fine.
But I do appreciate the rate of fire.
To me, that sounded like about eight rounds a second, and I think that's a
much more formidable and usable rate of fire, especially when you're going to use burst mode.
Burst mode when your blaster only shoots five rounds a second, four rounds a second…
It's just not that useful because you can pull the trigger manually faster.
Overall, I think it's a really awesome thing to see this implemented on an
off-the-shelf blaster that we can all buy.
I really hope that all of this will be directly compatible and work really well
with upgraded cages and flywheels because as much as I love the three-stage thing here,
I really think that we can make this thing sing with a single or dual stage pulsar or…
Probably pulsar.
-Daybreak?
-Daybreak would be a tight fit.
Not with the board in there, that's for sure, but certainly pulsar, a dual-stage pulsar;
we've already got that cage on the shop, and I think that's a really solid option.
A couple of other little notes I wanted to add in here.
There is a small hole on the side of the battery
door here on the corner and I kind of wondered in the past what it was for,
and apparently, you're supposed to run your battery alarm out that and attach it to the side.
However, you only need to do that if you use the absolute largest pack possible.
I was able to fit a battery alarm inside over the weekend,
but it is going to depend on what battery you use, and you definitely want to make
sure you've got a battery that has plenty of current because six flywheel motors is a lot.
It's also worth noting Greg pointed out to me that there is another display on the actual
main board inside here, and that display shows an identical copy of what's on this
external (what I would call an auxiliary display) that's up top.
So depending on the blaster, some blasters could probably have this board just situated on the side
of the blaster where it's peeking out the side, and that would make it really easy to access.
It has the same buttons and configuration there for adjusting everything, so
they're literally just clones of each other as far as the two displays.
I think that's actually
exceptionally nice for those that might want to build their own blaster around this smart board.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and any other questions you have about
the board about what it can do, what it can't do.
You've probably realized this by now, but it's a very robust board
that can be used with just about any blaster that exists.
It's already set up for both fully automatic and semi-automatic blasters, so
presumably, we as a community or hobby could easily be designing blasters around this board.
Now, as far as I can tell, there's no brushless support; I don't see any ports for the ESC signal,
so that's a little bit disappointing, but I don't think Worker has done anything brushless to date.
I'm really excited to see what people do with the board,
almost more than the blasters that they're currently going in.
Though, after playing with this at a game last weekend, I had a really good time.
It felt really good in the hands; it’s very snappy…
It's a little bit on the loud side, but for CQB, it is a solid offering.
Let me know what you think of this in the comments.
Until next time, I’m out of darts.