[rockchuck]

Hello
can I use a heng long ver 7 smoke unit on the TCB.  The wiki says to plug the heater into the smoker port and the fan into the Aux port of the TCB. The hl smoker is 6 volts so the AUX port is ok at 5 volts however the SMOKER port is battery at 7.4 volts. Can I use two 3amp diode is series to drop the volts from the SMOKER port down to 6.2 volts (close enough) or do I need to connect an adjustable voltage regulator to get 6 volts.
cheers
rock chuck

[LukeZ]

Hi Rock, I doubt the extra ~volt or so will hurt the heating element, it's just a wire that gets hot. But since you are using Separate Heat & Fan, if you want you can effectively just drop the voltage to the heating element in OP Config by setting the Heat percentage (for all three: Idle, Fast Idle and Max) to something less than 100%. About 80% should give you the equivalent of around 6 volts.

[rockchuck]

Thanks Luke I will try that. Looks like you can't buy the original pumper type smokers anymore so hence the new HL type is the cheapest alternative.
cheers
rock

[IIHadesII]

I have built my own smoker unit, and it works very well. The only issue I’ve noticed is that when you regulate the percentage through the OP Config, it still seems to use close to 100% power on motor startup. During the first second of startup, the heating wire sometimes gets extremely red hot.

I bought my own heating wire and, after doing some calculations, cut it to the correct length. I then wrapped it around a fiberglass cotton rope and enclosed it with additional regular cotton. After adding smoke machine fluid, I assembled everything into a housing. I also installed a small 5V fan and connected all components according to the Open Panzer Wiki instructions.

The system works great overall. It takes a little time to heat up and start producing smoke, but once it’s running for a while, it generates a significant amount of smoke.

[LukeZ]

I have built my own smoker unit, and it works very well. The only issue I’ve noticed is that when you regulate the percentage through the OP Config, it still seems to use close to 100% power on motor startup. During the first second of startup, the heating wire sometimes gets extremely red hot.

Hi Hades, you are correct, there are a couple seconds at engine start where the heating element was set to 100%, regardless of what the user specifies for a max heat percentage in OP Config. This was an oversight on my part. I have posted a new TCB firmware release (0.94.05) that should fix it.