Finally M1A2 Abrams!
 

After a few years of waiting for a nice Abrams to come out, I finally got mine. Everyone has their favorite war chariot, this one happens to be tied with the Leo 2A6 for me, but really I enjoy almost all tanks even though I favor more modern steel. I figured I'd create a thread to show what I'm working on and to get help and insight from more knowledgeable members on here. Everyone knows what a box-stock tank looks like, so I'll skip those photos and go straight to a few I took last night after my first step of weathering was completed. I'm practicing various techniques and ended up using a micro fiber towel and lots of rubbing with acrylic paints to try to give the Abrams a more real world look. I've still got a ways to go, but it already looks better than fresh painted tan. I'm now thinking I should have waited to put all the accessories on, but most should pop back off with little trouble.

http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/d...ds/image_3.jpg

http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/d...ds/image_1.jpg

http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/d...ds/image_2.jpg

And here's my first endeavor into the world of aftermarket sound. Thanks to Dan at Battle Armor for the tutorial on this budget-friendly avenue of adding some audio realism, I went ahead and bought 4 of these USB sound modules from Electronics 123. They are awesome little units and will work great for an Abrams due to the turbine power plant. There is plenty of actual track noise and squeaks to go along nicely with the turbine loop file I made, so it should sound pretty good moving around. I also made up cannon fire/eject/reload files, specifically 4 different ones with some mixed in chatter so each time the cannon is fired it will play a different one. Turret traverse is also there, so now it's just a matter of hooking everything up! I'm still waiting on my amplifiers, they are 2.5W Mono with adjustable gain and run on 3-5.5V, I'm hoping they give some nice sound out of the Visaton FRS7-4 driver. I'm about $50 into parts for this project and it's cool to be able to show something that has files I made, I'm really enjoying it!

http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/d...ds/image_4.jpg

Glad I could help. They are a fascinating little card especially with the file structure they use, makes them pretty powerful once you get an understanding of the different triggering options. They also have a digital interface that I have not explored nor is it documented well. But there is a chance that sound could be triggered digitally vs the analog method they promote. This will give you some idea of why I like the TBS so much. It is all about easily generating your own sound files. You have been working with this 123 sound cards and are already demonstrating that the sound file building and manipulation is an enjoyable part of this hobby itself.

Just a note of caution. When working with these cards on the bench everything worked fine, but with the added electrical interference from the motors the engine trigger would not always work. IF you run into this problem you might want to think of getting another 2.4 ghz MFU and using iti in parallel . so you use the one for soley driving the electric motors.

Keep us posted.

They are very cool little cards, I'm impressed and have been having lots of fun loading sounds and playing with them. I haven't found out if they can play sound when a trigger is released though, that would be a nice feature. I like projects like this and tanks are a form of RC that doesn't have to do with my actual job, which happens to be for a manufacturer of RC components for ground vehicles. It's a nice break from the madness of the other part of RC my life revolves around.

That's good to know about the possible trigger issues, hopefully I can figure something out if I run into any problems getting them to work. If my amps would hurry up and get here I could start actually working on getting it all wired up! I'm betting is has something to do with the PWM signals since the motor drive circuits aren't full on until full throttle, and even then the HL MFU might not actually be letting them have full battery connection.

Got my amplifiers today, these little guys are tiny! I'm going to solder them up and see how it sounds. If all is good, time to get it into the tank.

http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/d.../IMG_54631.jpg

oh I like that tank a lot.. wonder how to weather it thought im a newb

Thanks! It's actually not that hard. All you need are some acrylic paints, a toothpick and a micro fiber shop towel. I dilute the black paint and drip it into all the sunken areas, then wipe the shop towel across the surface after a minute or so. It picks some of the paint up on the way over and then spreads it on the surface. After I do a lot of the panel lines and screens and such I come back with the micro fiber, put diluted paint on it and go to town scrubbing everywhere. It's easy to control how dirty and worn the tank looks and clean up is easy too.

On another note, my amps work great, the speaker is very loud and now I just need to build an enclosure and get this wired up! Tweaking the sound files a little bit right now.

http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/d.../IMG_54641.jpg

Amp works great, this is pretty loud! I found the perfect box to mount it in also and I don't care what people say, these speakers sound much better in an enclosure. Pretty decent bass out of it, I'm happy. Abrams is coming apart tonight to start the actual install. I'll get it all wired up and bench test it again before finishing it up.

are you staying with the HL electronics and just redoing the sound?

Yep, just want better sound and I like custom projects. I've had fun so far! I do want to upgrade my others to hobby grade though, someday. If I would quit buying tanks I could have upgraded the first two!

Well, not really sure what happened. I wired everything up per the instructions in the tutorial and I just kept getting a weird feedback out of the speaker. Went back to the AAA battery setup, worked with the buttons. Tried hooking the button pin to the smoker pin and nothing. Now the smoker just runs all the time no matter what when I put it back in and disconnected the sound card. Bummer...

This is all Heng Long electronics?

Did you let the smoke out of anything?

Go back to square one and see if everything is functioning stock. Ie does the MFU still work and are the sound cards working

Both cards still work and the MFU is fine other than the smoker now is always on, so I took it out. Abrams doesn't need smoke anyways. Maybe it's a sign I should just upgrade the boards, I've already got two 6ch radios and receivers, plus the Visaton speakers now.

Well if it is any consolation, I have had many failed first attempts

Put a BARC in it. You will love it.