# Fourbanger prop controller



## Notevery1 (Sep 15, 2019)

I’m new to the forum and have built a pop up monster from chicken wire, pvc pipe, a solenoid, relay, motion sensor and compressed air. That was 15 years ago and I just resurrected it. This year I thought i’d Go big and try the fourbanger controller. I’m not electronic savvy, but ordered all the parts, wired the boards up and tested without it hooked up to any devices. Everything works when hooked up to the USB power, but appears to go into an endless reboot when connected to a 12vdc 2amp power supply. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong. Thanks.


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## MBrennan (Sep 22, 2008)

It could be your power supply - I had trouble at one point with a "12vdc" power that was actually more like 16+ and the nano clone I was using didn't like it.

I switched to a 9vdc supply and it worked fine. Unless you are using 12v relays...

Might be worth a try for trouble shooting anyway.

Good Luck!


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## willy (Jul 15, 2019)

Try the octobanger download, i know it works. And confirm power supply is regulated 12v. Double check all wires are on correct pins, ping the board in the octobanger program it will tell each pin number and hi/lo settings. I had my pir on pin 10 instead of 11 and that caused endless scare loop. Hope you figure it out.


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## rattle57 (Nov 2, 2013)

For next year I would like to improve some of my props using a prop controller. I have gone to the four banger web page and it is gone. Now I don't know what to use? Any help would be great.

Never mind I found a link on a different forum.


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## pyroandy (Oct 22, 2019)

> Never mind I found a link on a different forum.


Can you post a link?


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## Hippie Crane (Sep 17, 2019)

Why use obsolete stuff with 4 or 8 outputs when you could as easily get controllers with over a hundred channels?


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## David_AVD (Nov 9, 2012)

Hippie Crane said:


> Why use obsolete stuff with 4 or 8 outputs when you could as easily get controllers with over a hundred channels?


Probably because it suits the application and has some cool software to program it.


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## pyroandy (Oct 22, 2019)

Hippie Crane said:


> Why use obsolete stuff with 4 or 8 outputs when you could as easily get controllers with over a hundred channels?


What controller has hundreds of channels? All of the ones we use have 8 or less. I think I would cring if a prop needed hundreds of channels.


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## Hippie Crane (Sep 17, 2019)

I make a controller that has 128 channels and runs directly off of the left audio RCA Jack on a dvd player lol, no computer needed for playback, only a standard DVD Player. I store the scene data on the DVDs and a sequence can be a long as you want.


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## David_AVD (Nov 9, 2012)

No computer required to run the button banger either. Once programmed it runs stand alone. No DVD player required.


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## Hippie Crane (Sep 17, 2019)

The point of me using a DVD Player is to store the actual show data over time rather than everything being in a fixed storage size. Say instead of 16MB SD card I can store 1byte per 1.8 milliseconds. The purpose of that is being able to have sequences as long as you want, you could have a sequence that ran for 2 hours controlling all 128 channels. The DVDs store the sequence data in real time which loads into the controller like a modem while its playing. You could even use something like a 6 disk changer and have hours and hours of programming.


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## David_AVD (Nov 9, 2012)

I understood the concept, but don't see it as a good fit for the job at hand. A lot of people want each prop in their Halloween display to be triggered. The data stream would make more sense for a "canned" show.


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## Hippie Crane (Sep 17, 2019)

what do you mean by a "canned" show? You could also use triggerable AV Players or any other AV Device


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## David_AVD (Nov 9, 2012)

What I mean is that if the one data source is feeding lots of different props (each will only a few control channels), they will all be in sync.


I don't know about others, but I like each prop to run independently and since each one only requires a few channels having a triggered AV player per prop seems wasteful.


Have you posted the finer details of your system in another thread? I have seen you mention it here and there, but never a full run down on what it can do, exactly how you create the data stream or what the physical interfaces are.


Maybe if you did that (in a new thread) people could ask more about it?


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## Hippie Crane (Sep 17, 2019)

David_AVD said:


> What I mean is that if the one data source is feeding lots of different props (each will only a few control channels), they will all be in sync.
> 
> I don't know about others, but I like each prop to run independently and since each one only requires a few channels having a triggered AV player per prop seems wasteful.
> 
> ...


I made a thread


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