Hello Friends,

With Sgt. Wookies great assistance the working operating King Tiger Tank Commander is coming to life very soon. He is working great. In the tank I installed a recoil system to make the 8.8 recoil when the cannon shoots.

The stock electronic controller featured a cannon sound that more resembles someone bursting a paper bag. The LED for the simulated muzzle blast was also less than authentic.

To solve the blast problem I relplaced the LED with a Xeon strobe from a disposable camera. That works great.

For the sound of the mighty L/71 88mm I recorded an actual 88 being fired onto a Radio shack sound module.

It operates very well but I need more volume, as the cannon sound is being drown out by the engine sounds.

Anyone know what I might use to boost the sound? Reostat maybe?

Thanks!

Don

 

There are many audio amp circuits and ICs on the internet that can give you a few watts of audio amplification. They are usually pretty easy to deal with.

The out from your sound module to the input of the amp IC. A few resistors or a POT to set the volume and a speaker to play the sound through. Thats about it other than the standard voltage in and GND pins.

Ill check around, but there are some folks who have some ICs on the tip of their tongue.

How much room do you have for the audio amp?

If you are very limited in space, an op amp or possibly a transistor could do the trick.

 

Thanks RM,

I am a bit limited on room. In the tank I have the speaker for engine sounds, smoke unit Reciever, control board. I have about a a 4" by 1" space left at the rear of the hull for an amplifier. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again

Don

 

There is an LM4990 which is a 2W amp at 4 ohms. So It depends on the ohm rating of the speaker you will be using. It costs around 1.30 from digikey. It is a surface mount chip, but if you can make your own pcb it should be quite easy. There is no reason a 2 in x 1 in board would not be fine.

Here is the digikey link. The data sheet link is on the page.:
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=LM4990MMCT-ND

See if you can get the Wattage and ohm rating for the speaker you are using and we can find a more suitable IC.

 

How much power does the existing amplifier produce and how much power do you need for it to be loud enough?
Note: 10 times the power sounds only twice as loud since our hearing's sensitivity is logarithmic.

The speaker load impedance for an amplifier, its supply voltage and whether it is a bridged amplifier determine its output power.

 

Thanks,

It is a 8 ohm speaker taken from a toy fire truck. The little module from Radi oShack is powered by a 9 volt battery.

Don

 

RadioShack is gone from Canada so I don't know which sound module and how much output power it produces.

 

RadioShack is gone from Canada so I don't know which sound module and how much output power it produces.

I am sure google or radioshack.com is still accessible even from canada....

 

Are you CRAZY audioguru set his router to ban all access to RS sites.

torpedo, did you find the watt rating of the speaker?

 

When RadioShack was still in Canada they sold mostly cell phones and kid's RC car toys.
Their electronic parts were way over-priced and maybe were "seconds".
Most switches, relays and LEDs had spec's listing only their weight.

I bought some of their speakers when they were sold at a very low "clearance" price, used the enclosure and replaced the garbage Korean speaker drivers with real and good European speaker drivers.

 

When RadioShack was still in Canada they sold mostly cell phones and kid's RC car toys.
Their electronic parts were way over-priced and maybe were "seconds".
Most switches, relays and LEDs had spec's listing only their weight.

I bought some of their speakers when they were sold at a very low "clearance" price, used the enclosure and replaced the garbage Korean speaker drivers with real and good European speaker drivers.

I don't think anyone asked your opinion on what RS sells, everyone knows it is crap so why reiterate it? Your hatred for everyone in asia and their neighboring countries shows WAY too much in your banter against imported goods from those countries (or anything outside Canada) I would really like to see you go a whole day in your Canadian life without using anything that was made, fabricated, duplicated, reverse engineered and put out into the market cheaper, by any of the asian countries (or anywhere outside Canada) especially china. I can guarantee you can not go a day without using any of the imported "crap" you always speak about. Do me a favor, keep you banter against other countries to yourself, this is a world wide forum after all.

I can't even find anything made in Canada around my house, must be that you guys can't even put out crap (Oh wait you can, that's why we have a crappy Governor, she's Canadian!! Would have been better off hiring a Chinese or a Korean to do a better job, quicker and cheaper too!)

 

The Blackberry smart-phone with mini keyboard was designed and is made in Canada. My daughter has one. For many years Northern Telecom designed and made telephones and central office machines in Canada. Our Nuclear electricity generators are sold all over the world.

When I go shopping, the store workers are almost always "visible-minority" and can barely "speeky zee Enrgrish". Now, they are all over the place, way too many have come here.

Yes, most cheap Chinese products are garbage.
My electrical utility company gave away compact fluorescent bulbs for free. Then they were recalled because some dripped burning plastic. One of mine was smoking and dripping molten plastic on my table and luckily it happened while I saw it happening before my home burned down. The Chinese manufacturer simply illegally copied the certification label from a competitor. The garbage product was never certified.

 

Don,

Since you are so limited in space, perhaps one of your few options is to use a couple of LM386N-1 audio amplifier IC's in a push-pull configuration. Radio Shack stocks those ICs, so you won't have to send away from them.

The LM386N-1 audio amplifier is best operated from 12v DC. As you have mentioned before, your primary battery is 7.2v. Using your prime mover battery to power the audio as well is not a good thing. However, you are running into a space problem.

9v "transistor" batteries are not your answer. They are pretty anemic even when brand new, and don't last very long - and won't last long even with the LM386 quiescent current (no signal input) of 8 to 16mA per amplifier IC at 12v.

You have a "space crunch" problem, too. You say 1" x 4" - where's the 3rd dimension? If you only have a 2-dimensional space left, you're done.

 

1" X 4" X 3" is the space I have to work with.

Thanks

Don

 

Thats PLENTY.

You can use a 4x3 inch board that is 1 inch tall and install it on its side.

You can fit a whole PC in there: http://gizmodo.com/184234/credit-card+sized-pc

 

Here is the sound I have as of now. I needto make an adjustment ot the micro switch. The moving tank commander circuit waqs designed by Sgt. Wookie. This has never been done in this scale and is a giant step in the RC tank hobby.

The flash of the cannon was made from the flash of a disposable camera.

Don

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfwZwdWoYs

 

The engine sounds good, but the gun firing definitely needs some help!

Show us how you have the engine sound system wired up - I'm not talking photos of it, I mean a schematic. What are you using to play the sound, then amplify the sound? If you didn't build the amplifier, do you have a manufacturer and part number for it?

Does the engine sound amplifier have a means to adjust the volume? If so, on a scale of 1 to 10 (1=too quiet to hear, 10=loud as it can go), where do you have the volume set?

Rather than build another amplifier, I'm thinking that you might be able to use your existing amp - but don't just start wiring things in unless you want to let the magic smoke out

[eta]
Come to think of it, photos would be a help, too - if you can make them well-focused.

What I'm thinking is, that if both the engine sound playback device and the sample player you have the cannon sound recorded on are line-level audio going into an amplifier, maybe we can put together a simple "summer" circuit to mix the two sounds together before the amplifier.

But, I don't want to do this "willy-nilly" just hooking things up at random. You might burn something up, and we don't want that.

Start by labeling what each wire is, and where it connects on both ends of the wire. This will help you out quite a bit if things get "fuzzy" in the middle of the project, and you forget where things go. It will make the project a lot less frustrating.

 

Many videos on YouTube sound awful. Maybe the recorder has a poor frequency response or maybe the amplifier in the tank has no low frequency response. Maybe the speaker has no enclosure.

I heard the noisy sounds from a cheap toy car electric motor and gears, and a faint high frequency "click" instead of a cannon's low frequency BOOM.

 

Well, the speaker is inside the tank. Perhaps the tank can serve as an enclosure. Only Torpedochief can tell us whether or not the tank is more or less sealed up.

Try to play nice, AG - would you?

 

Try to play nice, AG - would you?

I thought the blast from the tank is not supposed to sound like the click of a lighter.
My 3" computer speakers are in pretty big enclosures, have pretty big magnets and are driven with 3.5W each. They can make the sound of a tank blast very well.

Just think how good the realism will be if some smoke is added to each blast.
I have seen toy trains with smoke.