Pepperisit12 Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 Mine arrived the other day (eBay), I'm not the greatest with words but I'll put my opinions up later on Link to post Share on other sites
Pepperisit12 Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 Right, as above. I ordered my XCorTech X3300W from eBay a few weeks ago. Packaging is good, cardboard box with the the design of a peli-case drawn on the outside. Internally it is divided into three sections for the three parts. The tracer/silencer, the peq style controller, and the burst controlling 'mosfet'. The tracer part first. The silencer is a similar build to the asg tracers in that that it is plastic with a metal cover. It is longer than the asg ones however. The rear of the unit is a lighter grey than the metal and I feel that it makes the unit look a little cheap, when it is mounted on a gun though it is not particularly noticeable. When batteries are installed (springs at both ends of the battery channels so batteries tricky to remove) and you switch the unit on the button glows green for a few seconds and then flashes briefly once every few seconds to indicate it is switched on. The threads are standard 14mm negative however my unit at least has a wobble on all of my gun's but nothing that a couple of wraps of ptfe tape won't solve! The tracer function works very well, brighter than the asg tracers and I have tested it at 25 rps and the tracer keeps up no problem. Next the control unit. It takes 2 AA batteries and has a very good quick detach system. Even though the QD is made out of plastic it fits the rails very tight with no wobble at all. The peq styling itself are acceptable, nothing beautiful but it wouldn't look out of place on any modern rifle. The box itself though is made entirely of plastic and I am unsure how it will stand up to a direct hit from a bb. The switch on the top to change mode has a positive click and the dial on the front is of good quality. There are various settings I will not go into here but the main functions are; Count Up, Count Down, Speed (chrono), and Rate of Fire. The count up and down settings work as you would expect (obviously you need to be using the tracer in conjunction) you have to set the number to count down from in the settings. The chrono function seems a little low compared to what I normally get from other chronos but as I dont own another then I will have to wait until my next game to confirm this. The same goes for the rate of fire setting. It gives the result in the form of shots per minute and my KSC mp9 came out at just over 1240 rpm. Which works out at aroud 21 rps. When using the additional inline 'mosfet' (i use inverted commas as it will NOT protect your trigger contacts and you need a hard wired mosfet to do that) you can set a certain number of rounds to fire in a burst upto 9. Whenever you're aeg is set to full auto it will only fire bursts of the number you have set. To revert to full auto you just press the button on the front of the controller three times quickly in any mode and again to switch to burst. It also has the ability to check the voltage of your lipos and cut off the power when it drops too low. It indicates this to you by vibrating the aeg's motor. It is also to note that this part comes with mini tamiya connectors so I had to change these to deans and obviously it cannot work with gbb. (though the tracer, counters etc all still do) The unit has worked perfectly so far (only testing) but I am slightly worried about the quality of the plastic housing of the peq style controller. For the price I paid (£80) it is a vastly better tracer than the asg ones (£40) and with the features of a burst wizard also. The ability to change the settings on the fly is useful and the ability to use it with each of my guns always a bonus. I am as yet unsure of how accurate the chrono function is but it appears to be consistent so if it is lower than other chrono's then at least it is a regular amount. Even as an approximate then it is useful. EDIT: forgot to mention that this unit does not disable the aeg when the count down function gets to zero. I believe that this is a major oversight and they should have added this function as the controller and burst function combination have the power to do this. It seems a shame and as the internals are all pcb and microchips I doubt there is any way to add this function after purchase. (Anyone tech minded enough they could help?) Link to post Share on other sites
Stuey Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 If you or another owner could open it up and tell us what microcontroller is in there, there might well be a way to connect to the controller and change the code to allow a stop-on-empty feature (and anything else you could dream up). Link to post Share on other sites
Pepperisit12 Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 Took it apart, will attach photos. Hopefully the quality is good enough. There are two 'chips' and neither has any writing on top. The other side of the circuit board is simply the pins and solder. No writing there either. took two with slightly different lights but I don't understand what I'm seeing in front of me! Let me know if you need any information from the circuit board or better quality photos (i'll get the camera if needs be) Link to post Share on other sites
Feyd Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 I don't know anything about reprogramming the chips, but I think the stop on empty may add problems, the moment you have a misfire it will detect it as an empty mag (which may or may not be what you want) and it will only detect an empty mag after the first dry fire, which would make it pointless for certain players, how would you be able to tell it you've put a new mag in? Are there any sockets for external expansions? Unless I've missed something, which is quite possible... Link to post Share on other sites
amateurstuntman Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 No, if you have the counter set to count down from a number you can have it stop when it reaches 0. Set the counter to 30 and then you will have to perform an action to reset the counter before you can continue shooting. You could set the micro controller to stop the gun from firing and then reset itself back to your number after an arbitrary amount of time to simulate a mag change (or to allow you to carry out a mag change) and then allow you to shoot again. It's all in the programming. Link to post Share on other sites
Pepperisit12 Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 What I am proposing is that on the CountDown mode the gun is cut off at zero until the counter is reset. The countdown mode works by first setting how many rounds your magazine holds. Then as you fire each bb fired lowers the counter by one. When you reach a certain number (also defineable by the user in settings) the display starts to flash. If the gun misfires or you have exhausted the magazine early the counter does not change as there is no bb passing the sensor of the tracer unit. When the counter is at zero the gun continues to fire as normal just that the counter does not change. To reset the counter you have to hold the front button on the control unit for 2 seconds and the counter reverts to the preset number and continues counting down. The numbers are honestly irrespective of the number of rounds in the magazine except for the fact that I set mine to about 5 rounds less than my mag capacity so I know when to reload. Hope that explains it all a bit clearer Feyd, although I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to rig a button within the magwell that connects to the front button hence resetting the counter everytime a mag is inserted and released when the mag is released. EDIT: sniped by amateurstutman - didn't think of an automatic timed reload counter but I would probably keep it attached to the button or one in the magwell in case I fired the last round and hadn't noticed and it auto resets. Link to post Share on other sites
PureSilver Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 What I am proposing is that on the CountDown mode the gun is cut off at zero until the counter is reset. I can't believe this feature wasn't offered already, to be absolutely honest. It would have been brain-dead simple to implement in the design/manufacture/programming stages, but it will be very difficult if not outright impossible to insert into a finished product without essentially reverse-engineering the programming first. It's pretty disappointing, to be honest, but not as disappointing as this: To reset the counter you have to hold the front button on the control unit for 2 seconds and the counter reverts to the preset number and continues counting down. Two seconds? That adds two seconds of me standing around looking like an idiot in addition to my already glacial magazine changes? Two seconds is a full midcap in fully-automatic mode. I can understand requiring more than a quick push to prevent you resetting it by accident, but surely half a second would have sufficed? Link to post Share on other sites
Feyd Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 Thanks for the explanation, I honestly did not even think of round counting, though it's plainly obvious now! Link to post Share on other sites
amateurstuntman Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 Wow, I don't have one but 2 seconds seems like an eternity. I can kneel, extract the used mag, pocket it, pull a fresh mag out of a pouch, insert it, stand up and aim about as fast as that. F1 teams can replace all 4 tyres on a car in that time. The designers have missed a trick there. In this world of high tech computer controlled everything they should really be doing better. Let's assume that there is already some kind of radio communication going on between the components. How hard would it be to implement a WiFi or Bluetooth controller into the main PEQ device to have the whole thing be able to be set up by an app on a smartphone. Change which features your device has, user programmable button functions, user defined modes, the above mentioned mag switch feature. Set options like my idea for an automatic counter reset vs pepperist prefering to have to press a button. Improve the MOSFET operation by integrating a computer MOSFET into the mech box and having it transmit data back to the PEQ and from there to the phone. You'd be able to select ROF, available fire modes, tracer operation and such from your phone. You'd be able to have the phone log # of shots fired and collect statistics like average auto burst length, average game day ammunition consumption and such and automatically upload them to social media. You'd be able to integrate the phone's GPS with the app to see where you moved in a game site, if you put an electronic compass and clinometer in the PEQ you'd be able to upload a bearing and azimuth for every shot fired and tag that with your phone's GPS data to allow you to put a google maps overly up after the game showing every round fired, from where and to where. Locations of mag changes, were they in cover or not? Put a button on the PEQ so you can log when you take a hit. You'll be able to get an idea of any parts of a site where you are frequently hit and be more careful. The manufacturer of this hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities of this technology. Ginge fired 10,000 rounds from a single location and didn't move for an entire game day. Like? Ginge covered 32 miles of running during the day, fired 3000 shots and took 104 hits. Like? Could be amazingly awesome. Is interesting. Link to post Share on other sites
PureSilver Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 Link to post Share on other sites
Stuey Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 Yeah stunt's right, there's a lot of potential for this stuff. There's a reasonable chance the wireless comms this thing uses are 2.4 GHz, wouldn't be a huge step to make it Bluetooth or Wi-Fi enabled. Setting it up using your phone would certainly be wayyy easier than the menu system on the device. A friend was had a project to build a similar thing (as part of a Halo gun...) with data tracking from the chrono and stuff (think about following your gun's fps over time, could be interesting). Anyone with a modicum of electronics knowledge could build one of these and customise it to their liking. The inadequacies of this product are almost enough to motivate me to get off my *albatross* and knock together a prototype. Almost. With regard to the X3300W, I was rather hoping the microchips would at least say what they were on them, without that info I'm a bit stumped. Could always ask Xcortech nicely in a email? In any case it may be worth emailing them to suggest the 'stop firing' feature for future units, they have been known to communicate with their customers. Link to post Share on other sites
Pepperisit12 Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 ok I've just timed it and it is not quite 2 seconds, somewhere between 1 and 1.5 seconds. I'm intending to mount my peq box to my chest as most of my guns dont have enough rails (mostly smgs) So I suppose I will be pressing it just after mag changing. I change mags way out of the line of fire anyway so I don't see it being the end of the world. I will have to wait a few weeks to test it out at a skirmish anyway. Stuey I have already emailed them asking if there is any way to modify the unit to add it and hear nothing back (waiting a week now) but I will attempt again sometime soon. Link to post Share on other sites
Stuey Posted September 8, 2014 Report Share Posted September 8, 2014 OK well I hate to break it to you, the way to do it is to connect to the microcontroller in there, upload the code that it runs to a computer, modify it with the new feature and re download it to the chip. Short of that, you may struggle. Definitely want to hear what you think of skirmishing with it though! Link to post Share on other sites
Deadmeat Posted September 19, 2014 Report Share Posted September 19, 2014 I finally received mine today after 4 and a half months since I preordered from Evike.... It's actually a surprisingly sturdy set of gear. Just had a quick blast in the garden and the tracer is bright, 3 round burst works, the count down missed a couple of rounds but that was ok with me. I look forward to give this a skirmish to see how it performs. Link to post Share on other sites
PureSilver Posted September 28, 2014 Report Share Posted September 28, 2014 It's not much of an excuse for off-topic necroposting, but it occurs to me that it wouldn't be hugely difficult to reverse-engineer most of the features of the X3300W with an Arduino and some programming. I don't have any experience with either, but the hardware is flexible, widely available, not particularly expensive and the programming is supposed to be relatively simple. With required investment very low, what is to stop some airsofters creating an open-source project on any of the various resource hubs (SourceForge?) and crowdsourcing at least the desired features and capabilities of the system? Speaking with the bullet-proof confidence of the underinformed, it seems like a relatively simple project. Does anyone on Arnie's already develop for the Arduino or another, similar system? Or work in creating iOS/Android Apps? Link to post Share on other sites
amateurstuntman Posted September 28, 2014 Report Share Posted September 28, 2014 Hmmm a kickstarter that I would give a about? Controversial. Link to post Share on other sites
PureSilver Posted September 28, 2014 Report Share Posted September 28, 2014 Before Kickstarter or anything else you'd need to develop a product to show off. It's complicated, but it's not very complicated (apparently), and most of the parts are off-the-shelf and relatively affordable. Maplin sell most of the hardware needed for the functionality you described; operating entirely off guesswork, and using Adafruit only, I've guessed that you'd want: Arduino Micro OLED Graphic Display or 4-Digit 7 Segment LED Display for displaying round count, mode selection etcetera. Compass & 3-Axis Accelerometer for determining direction and elevation of shots. GPS for determining location. You'd need a WiFi or BlueTooth shield for connectivity to the smartphone (or buy a different Arduino board with one or both onboard), a USB cable and a breadboard, and you'd be all set for testing and programming the internal hardware, which from what I can tell is overkill for this sort of device anyway. Obviously the hardware is only the first step of the work required to get the system up and programmed, but it's a step that used to cost tens of thousands of pounds and is now sub-£100. Then you'd need to develop the App that would interface with the hardware, which would be an adventure in and of itself, too. I start a new job tomorrow morning, maybe I can squirrel some cash away for Arduino bits... Link to post Share on other sites
amateurstuntman Posted September 29, 2014 Report Share Posted September 29, 2014 Hmmm. I must be able to do this, I use Ubuntu. Link to post Share on other sites
muppetdaze Posted October 24, 2014 Report Share Posted October 24, 2014 Well I see it as the perfect tool to rebuild into an "alien" pulse rifle, if don't mind pulling the display apart Link to post Share on other sites
Stuey Posted October 24, 2014 Report Share Posted October 24, 2014 If all you want is a round counter for a pulse rifle, there are much cheaper ways of doing it than tearing one of these apart. Link to post Share on other sites
muppetdaze Posted October 27, 2014 Report Share Posted October 27, 2014 Yeah but a round counter won't do the other cool stuff as well 8) Link to post Share on other sites
jmutton Posted May 21, 2015 Report Share Posted May 21, 2015 Really interested in this. Does it auto reset the counter when it counts down? I can see it getting annoying having to hold the button down to reset once the mag is reload. Link to post Share on other sites
Deadmeat Posted May 21, 2015 Report Share Posted May 21, 2015 Really interested in this. Does it auto reset the counter when it counts down? I can see it getting annoying having to hold the button down to reset once the mag is reload. You have to hold the main button down to reset the counter but it's not that bad... unless you are under heavy fire then you just ignore the button until you get a chance to get into cover and just mag up again Link to post Share on other sites
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