New Accessories for the AirChrony S3

With the increasing abilities of AI it has become so much easier to take an idea to a finished, working item in a really short time.

I was thinking about the next teps for the AirChrony S3 and I had two ideas, an addon battery holder so that I didn't need to plug it into a USB powerbank and a remote monitor so that I could use it without my phone.

Addon Battery Carrier

I wanted to be able to have the option of using the USB powerbank or a dedicated supply that attached to the Chronograph, to this end I designed a sleeve that slid over the chronograph body and secured it using the the existing screw.  The battery slot was sized for an 620mAh LP602248 Li-Ion rechargeable pouch cell.

3D Render of the battery Sleeve

Actual assembled device

Sectional View from the Right Side

Due to the fact that the IR Detectors require a 5V supply to operate reliably I needed to supply 5V to the Xaio ESP32 rather that include a cell inside the device so I used a DC/DC step-up converter to increase the 3.7V cell voltage to 5V, the buck converter was very small and had the same connection pads as a USB C PCB connector I had and they soldered together perfectly, I soldered on a 2mm PH JST socket to the DC/DC conveter input to connect the batery to then slid the whole assembley into a 3D printed sleeve that fits into the USB connector entry of the Chronograph.

USB C Plug/DC/DC Buck Converter Assembly

 The above assembly in the 3D printed Sleeve

Remote Viewer Screen

The second accessory was a remote viewing screen that would connect to the Chronograph instead of the mobile phone and allow the viewing of the shot data and other functions.

I had an ESP32-S3 based display module that I'd bought from Aliexpress, this had a 2.8" capacitive touch screen, speaker output, battery charging circuit and SD card slot.  I designed an enclosure to house the display, speaker and an 1100mAh Pouch cell.

Whenever a shot is registered the display will beep (optional).

3D Rendering of the case

Actual Screen Layout

All the code for the display was written using Gemini Antigravity AI in a couple of hours, it's stil a work in progress with more functions to be added but so far it all seems to be working.

When I'm happy with the final version I'lI will post all the files/code on my github www.github.com/gadjet