IBU2 installed and reviewed

[971wright]

Hi Rob The ibu does shut down if the voltage drops to 6v , you need fully charged battery which is in good condition . if for any reason the battery drops it shuts down . Running the Toecrusher it needs 3 batteries to run it .going to fit LiPO battery to get around having 3 batteries .

regards pete

[Tankbear]

Rob,

The IBU2 differentiates between Mi-MH batteries and LiPo batteries when it comes to low voltage think 6v normally and 6.6v for LiPo. Dip switch 4 lets you set the battery type you are using.

Ian.

[wibblywobbly]

Hey guys my ibu2 does the same thing when am using nimh batterys, using lipo's now and not done it since, so I think it does cut off when it detects a low voltage in nimh batteries, I have heard lipo's don't suffer from voltage drop under load as bad as nimh, how that helps.

Ah-ha! So it is a current spike that does it. That answers the question, many thanks.

Setting the battery type to Nimh won't cure it (mine is set to Nimh), as it is the spike that is overloading the board, it can't pull enough power from a battery that is dropping to 7v to deal with driving the motors, firing the gun, flashing the muzzle, powering the IR, passing through the elevation motor drive and kicking the motors into reverse. All of this happens when the left stick is pushed up. It is the track recoil that pulls the most amps, hence it just shuts the board down and the tank has to be restarted. An Nimh with a good charge in it will be ok, as will a Lipo, but the track recoil will disable the electronics long before the low voltage detection cuts in.

The easy way around it is to disable the track recoil, to be honest I prefer it without as I can't imagine that it does the gearboxes any good to be going flat out in one direction and than get reversed while the tank is still moving forward.

I guess it wouldn't be beyond the coding possibilities to alter the firmware so that it reads something along the lines of:

If TrackRecoil = 1 then
If right stick signal = null then TankRecoil =1
Else
If right stick signal <> null then TankRecoil = 0
Endif

That way, regardless of what the track recoil was set at, it would be disabled if the right stick was moved. So it would never activate if the tank was moving, eradicating gearbox stress, and the low battery voltage would never be a problem.

I am hoping that the postman brings my styrene sheets today, so that I can put in a new floorpan and build a removable board mount. I ordered a Visaton speaker last night so that should be here in a couple of days. Farnells do them for about £7.70 and free postage. Bargain.

For anyone that has customised the sounds on one of the old Elmods, and is wondering what the difference is between that and an IBU, I can best sum it up this way:

The Elmod would play each sound to completion once it had been triggered, hence it took a lot of work to create a folder of sounds around 0.5 secs long that created a complete set that sounded 'right'. It does however have far greater scope for more sounds for each stick movement. I stress that this is how the pre-Fusion boards worked, the current Fusion boards may be different.

The IBU will stop playing the current sound when a stick movement is detected, which means that creating sound files does not need to be as precise. There are restrictions on the number of sounds that can be linked to say turret rotation and barrel elevation, there are only two on the rotation and one on the elevation.

IBU and Elmod use the same 8 bit 22khz .wav format, so the sounds are directly interchangeable.
IBU uses 2 channel sound.
Elmod uses 8 channel sound. The amp is good and loud.
The difference is apparent when say firing the gun, the IBU is barely audible if the engine sounds are playing, the Elmod can be as loud as you like, all sounds are audible at the same time as they are on different channels.

The Elmod configuration software only runs under Windows. If you have a Linux OS you can't use it. I tried using Wine and PlayOnLinux but couldn't get either to run properly ( I am a Linux noob so ..)

I am working on trying to get hold of a decent gun fire sound that I can boost up in Audacity, so that it is more audible.

You can increase the sounds on either an IBU or an Elmod by mixing sounds. Eg Turret rotation sound is by default a single hum or whatever. If you load that into Audacity and then add more tracks, like radio chatter, or background battlefield noise, and then merge them into a single track, all of the sounds will play at the same time. You can of course replace the sounds with different ones, so you could simply have radio chatter instead of a turret rotation sound. This is a good option on a tank destroyer where there is no turret, you have unused turret rotation sounds so you can replace them with others that are activated when the left stick is pushed left or right.

RobG

[wibblywobbly]

Just to add to this review. I had a standard 256 SD card with the IBU2, but for ease in swapping the board between tanks I decided to use a spare 4gb camera SD card that I had sitting here doing nothing. Looking on the web it seemed that various people had problems with cards greater than 2gb, but I thought what the hell, no harm in trying.

I deleted everything off the card, loaded on sounds, but it wouldn't work.
Tried reformatting it, but still no joy (I was using FAT32).
Went off and read some more and discovered that it has to be FAT16, the old DOS format version.

It took a while to figure out how to get an SD card formatted as FAT16, but as I was using my Linux laptop it was a simple matter of downloading a free program (everything inc the OS is free on Linux) and trying that.

I reloaded the sounds, and bingo, a 4gb working SD card.

In case it helps anyone wanting to do a quickly removable board, here's how I did it.

Mount a rectangle of styrene on the underside of the board using standoffs.
Glue a strip of styrene channel at one end of the hull plate.
Glue a block of styrene the same thickness as the one on the standoffs to the base, right next to where the edge of the base is when the other end is slotted into the channel.
Glue a tab onto the upper side of the base.
Install the card, and drill a hole through the tab and into the block that is now beneath it.
Insert a self tapping screw to hold the board in place.
Now it can't move at all.

The other advantage of having a styrene base securely mounted under the IBU is that you can put the unit down anywhere and the pcb is protected against damage.

[Trailbiker]

Rob, just been reading your posts, and it seems as if you're right about the gun sounds being barely audible. I've just installed an IBU2, and thought there was something wrong with it. Mine is in a Leopard 2 and the engine sounds aren't very good at all. I also bought a small Visaton speaker and put that at the rear, but when the engine sounds are playing you can hardly hear the MG, although the main gun sound is more noticeable. I removed the MicroSD card and played the sounds on my laptop, and they didn't really sound much better. Not sure whether the Leopard ones are particularly accurate, judging by the engine videos on YouTube !
I see from your previous (and others) post that you've mounted the speaker in a box. Does this make any real difference to the sound quality, as opposed to just mounting it on two brackets ? Also, does anybody on here know how to reprogram the MicroSD card. I assume you need some sort of audio editing software, but how does the IBU2 know which engine sound files to play, if you change the file names ? And how many/how long should they be ?

[wibblywobbly]

You really do need to build a soundproof speaker box, as this pushes all of the sound out through the front of the speaker, rather than around the inside of the hull. It makes an amazing difference.

I have my IBU2 in my Bulldog, and made my own engine sound files, I used to own Elmod systems and served my apprenticeship making numerous sound sets on those. One way to check if the sounds are as loud as they can be is to download Audacity a free sound program and the best out there.

Load in the engine sounds files, and look at how close the sound envelopes are to the upper and lower maximum levels. If they are nowhere near then you can amplify the sounds so that they are almost touching. This means that the sounds are as loud as they can be without getting clipped, any higher and it will distort the sound. Then you simply save the files back onto your pc or sd card, but you have to make sure that you keep the same 8 bit 22ghz sound format. Select Other and Uncompressed, and delete any tags that appear. It will make sense when you see the process.

I actually found an excellent gun sound on one of the German tanks, but I can't recall which one. The same process can be applied.

Another way to do it is to download a You Tube file of a Leopard tank, extract the sound, and slice up the bits you want to make a new sound file. It takes a while to do and it requires a bit of knowledge of how Audacity works. When I get my Kodiak completed I will need to create a decent sound file for that. I already did one for the Chieftain ARV, and that is very loud.

The other alternative is to buy the add-on amplifier. Bogeyman did that on his Clark board and he says that is 'very' loud now.

The boards know which sounds to play based on stick positions. The sound files are numbered sequentially, so as you push the stick forward it stops playing a sound, and plays the next one. The IBU2 is only 2 channel, the downside of this is that it can never play more than two sounds at any one time, and that if the engine is running it reduces the volume on the gun/machine gun.

The Clark board operates in a similar way.

The only system that I know of that can cope with anything that you can throw at it is the Elmod, this is multi channel polyphonic sound. Of course with increasing functionality comes an increasing price. Clarks are the cheapest, but no programmable sound (you select the tank sound when you buy the board), then the IBU2, which is programmable sound but much the same output process, and then the Elmod which is as good as it gets.

The nice thing about the IBU2 is the simple swap from an RX18, no messing about with wiring. The Clark requires some simple soldering (a lot more if you run airsoft), and the Elmod requires a couple of wires converting to their plugs.

The speakers to go for are FRS7's or FRS8's. I use an FRS7 and it's plenty loud enough when the sound files are sorted.

Cheers

RobG

[Trailbiker]

Rob, thanks for all information. Perhaps I'll have a go at customising my sounds. Some of the leopard engine videos on YouTube, seem pretty good to have a go at.
Richard

[Trailbiker]

Rob, just tried to download Audacity and says it can't run on your PC (Windows 8.1) and I see the speakers you recommend are 8 ohm rather than 4. I thought I had to use 4 ohm ones with the IBU2. The difference is the resistance, right, but how does that affect the sound quality ?
Sorry, don't understand all this stuff, as a bit new to RC and tanks !!

[Trailbiker]

Rob, have managed to find a version of Audacity that runs on my PC. Now all I have to do is figure out how to work it all !

[Tankbear]

Use 4ohm speakers with the IBU2 for better sound amplification. 8 ohm will work but not as loud.

Ian.