darkSpyro

Sorry if this has been asked already, but i couldn't find it so....

... Is there a way to make the lightcore skylanders lightup without a portal? I'm going to make a display shelf for my children's skylanders and i thought it would be cool if there was a portion of the shelf that i could put something underneath so that lightcores/giants on that shelf would light up. I was thinking of getting a cheap wired portal on ebay and disassembling it to lower its physical dimensions and remove its internal LEDs so that the only thing lighting up was the characters, but I thought maybe there would be another method that people knew of other than destroying an existing portal.

Anything that used RFID or NFC technology should work. You could modify a portal to cover a larger distance (more copper wire), build a new frame for it and then plug it into a USB device and you'd have a display that activated the LED in the figures.

any idea how many lighcore figures one portal is capable of lighting up? I could do a bank of portals plugged into a hub if i had to, but would rather not..... guess that would be easy enough to test myself

Also, is anyone aware of any readily available devices that emit RFID or NFC (as mentioned by bionicle2809 above) that are cheaper than buying a skylanders portal off ebay? Seems they're currently going for around $10 which isn't bad, but i'm always looking to save money.

THIS AGAIN!?

You cannot just plug portals into dumb PSUs it won't work.

Without the Game the figure will not light.

I am working on a hack to modify the wireless portal (without the USB receiver), it involves removing the wireless chip inside and replacing it with an AVR (Arduino) chip.

The other option is buying a cheap RFID reader and Arduino clone on ebay and running my code to light up the figure.

Last option is to build an RF Emitter from scratch. This has been heavily covered in another thread in here.
Not a lot of components and not expensive, but requires electronics skills.

One portal (without a shell) could probably light up 8 normal sized characters; though the ones on the outside would be dimmer than on the inside.

Quote: bionicle2809

One portal (without a shell) could probably light up 8 normal sized characters; though the ones on the outside would be dimmer than on the inside.

But how? It's not that big.

daisy chain them. Just put battery-less wireless portals around pressing against the original powered connected portal.

Quote: ninja9351

Quote: bionicle2809

One portal (without a shell) could probably light up 8 normal sized characters; though the ones on the outside would be dimmer than on the inside.

But how? It's not that big.

The radio signal works around the edge, that's why I specified "without the shell". If you take the shell off and just have the board and the copper wire, it'll still work as a portal and can read Skylanders on the outside of the copper wire.

I also stupidly assumed the corded portals stayed on as long as power was being passed through the USB since until we bought swap force yesterday we had always used the cordless ones which stay on until you turn them off.

Also noticed while testing that even on the cordless portal the lightcore isn't lit up unless in game. It does blink briefly though when first turning on the portal so i know it's capable of lighting up the figure without a data source.

So it looks like i'll have to get out the voltmeter and see where and how much i need to bypass the voltage to get it to just always send out a "lightcore" signal without the need for data telling it to turn on. Suppose it would be best to add a switch somewhere along the line as well so that they can be turned off so i don't end up using up the lightcore LEDs lifespan while just sitting idle on a shelf 24/7.

... I'll post back in this thread after I get a chance to work on it in case anyone else is interested, but it probably won't be for a few weeks since I have other things on my to-do list that are more pressing and i'll have to get my hands on a portal that i don't mind destroying.

thanks for the info Pyrofer, i wrote post #9 without refreshing and didn't see all the other other info. Any chance you can give a link to the other thread where this was covered? As i said i searched for it but didn't see it.

Never mind, found it. This thread can be locked/closed/deleted, as Pyrofer stated, it's already been covered. Sorry for the duplication.

//forum.darkspyro.net/spyro/viewposts.php?topic=73090