Foil training aids

[SensibleStu]

Hey, dunno if this has been asked before but I'm trying to find schematics for a foil training aid that has the ability to dectect microbreaks in the circuit(so that you can test you flick hits) and also the ability to check the contact time (the time teh point is depressed). I've found a few different plans but they don't appear to do all of these things.

If anyone has any schematics or links to designs I'd appreciate it (don't really want to have to design one from scratch)

[SensibleStu]

Heh, just realised that my two problems are very closely related - if there is a microbreak then it needs to be able to stop counting the 14ms (contact time) and restart, this actually may be easier than I thought! I'll post results when i finish making it

[brtech]

I'm working on a remise trainer which blocks the first touch and allows a second touch within a limited time. The prototype is being tested now. The circuit would work for what you are looking for, but since it's microprocessor based, it would need new code. If the trainer works, we might make a run of them.

I'm not sure what you are doing with microbreaks. There is the microbreak which is the result of an impact, and is not related to a touch. This is what causes the Favero tester to light the yellow light without changing the red/green lights. I would imagine you want to ignore those. Then there is the microbreak that is the beginning or end of a touch. You want to effectively integrate them to determine the 14 ms minimum touch time. They can come in a burst. If you get one or more microbreaks, then the start of the 14 ms is probably near the first microbreak. There is no spec for this, and the manufacturers do different things.

[SensibleStu]

Yeah, as soon as I posted the reply I realised i need not worry about microbreaks as they are more likely to happen with contact with a lame - manufacturers overcome the problem by haveing a button press time and a contact with lame time which aren't necessarily the same as far as I can tell, means different boxes behave differently!

I'm not sure quite what you mean by microbreaks either
I assume you're talking about switch debounce kind of thing which is easy enough to compensate for!
thanks for the reply anyway

[brtech]

If you look at what the tip switch does, you can see two effects:

You can get a very short break from the normally closed switch position from a hard enough strike on the blade, without any tip depression. These must be ignored.

Then, on an actual hit, the switch may go off and on quite a few times, with the on and off times very short before settling down to a solid off. The same thing can happen when the touch is over. This indeed is a debounce problem, but you have to worry when you start counting the off time. If you had, just to be extreme, 12 x 1 ms microbreaks, followed by a 2 ms off time, is that a hit? What if it was 8 ms off time?

There is no rule for this.

I think that lame contact time doesn't have to be more than off time. If microbreaks were not an issue, and you had contact time exactly matching the tip depression, it's a hit. i suspect machines do different things if the lame contact is after the hit and the off time is short.