Looking for a newb guide - rewiring electronics

[Gaming Geek]

Hey all. I've got a side project as part of the armor costume I'm designing, and I've run into some simple problems that I really shouldn't.

Does anyone have links to guides? I think I want to brush up on this stuff before doing anything serious. Specifically on giving a device a new power source. I'd rather not fry these things. :$


I'm trying to re-wire a sound effect generator to send output into a male headphone jack. I'll plug it into a belt-mountable PA speaker set, and mount them into my armor.

And once I get this working I want to rewire the two electronic parts to use a single external battery, instead of separate internal ones. That way when I have to recharge the effects while in costume I only have to plug up one battery, instead of having to take apart the whole thing to swap out AAA's and AA's.


Only thing is, somehow I managed to mess up splicing the wires for the first step. I mean, it's just twisting two wires, it shouldn't be this annoying... :confused I think one of the wires was stripped and I didn't notice when I spliced them. I'll redo that tonight.

(edit) I really do feel bad asking, but I haven't seen any threads to help with this, either here or on other cosplay sites.

Modding a computer case seems to be easier. You just play with lights and stuff... LED's I get, changing power units? ...not so much.

 

[thatdecade]

Combining power supplies can be tricky business unless they are the same voltage, and even then you may need to replace the battery with something bigger to handle the demand of your combined circuits.

I find for battery pack wiring help, the RCU forums are a good place to start.
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/

 

[wook111]

i would listen to this guy he really knows his stuff

 

[bulldogresler]

yeah i've never been good at rewiring electronics. there are probably a decent amount of tutorials for it tho.

 

[SchizophrenicMC]

Decade is right. Unless both units are running on the same voltage, you're gonna have to start adding more electronic bits to keep them at the correct voltage. Secondarily, unless you can get a battery that pumps out a lot of milliamps, you may end up with a unit that fails to start, because it can't put enough power through the current to power your devices.

This is why my helmet's fan setup is just 3 12-volt fans running on 4 9-volt batteries, with a switch and potentiometer in between.

 

[Gaming Geek]

Hm.

See, I thought it might be easier... The speaker is set up to use wall power or battery power, so if I got one of the universal battery units that you use to power DVD players and the like it wouldn't need anything special for that particular part... I'd get one of the ones that were made to power more than one device at once, and I know I'd have to set up resisters and diverters to the smaller one...


:/ Yea, it's been way too long since I did this stuff. I think I'm going to spend more time researching it before I do it.