Hey sorry for the late response and going dark. How has it been over there? It has been crazy around here. Had report cards to due and I started a game jam with a few of my students. And prepping for the car show that we have this weekend. I decided to take a break from the saber and work on that. Now I have a good amount of code blocked out I thought I would come back to the saber.
I've been quite busy too, but I'm back to working on saber-related stuff as well. (May the 4th tomorrow... :)
So I tried to find a short and I didn't see one, although the multi-meter wasn't working that great so I have to check again. Here are some pictures (shared with my google drive) of my build it will look different from yours, well mainly the chassis and orientation of parts, but everything should be connected in the same fashion. If you see anything let me know. I haven't attached the SD card reader because I am not sure how I want in orientated in the chassis. I don't think this would be causing the power boost to over heat. Light saber build pics - Google Drive
Regards,
GMcIvor
I agree that the missing SD card shouldn't cause any over-heat issues.
In fact, apart from not having any sounds to play, it shouldn't cause any issues at all. :)
I looked at the pictures for a while, but nothing jumped out at me as obviously wrong.
One thing that occured to me though: Since you seem to have a roomier chassis than I did for my build, you may want to incorporate more connectors in your build. That way, parts can be disconnected, tested and measured in isolation. Ideally you could build test rings that makes it easy to verify that each component is doing what it's supposed to that the students can use before hooking things up.
Anyways, back to your current build...
1) I would wire up a female aviation connector to only short the two black wires, nothing else. Plugging this in should
be enough to boot up the teensy. If it doesn't heat up with this, the problem is in the blade connector somewhere.
2) Get a working multimeter, plug in the connector from (1) and measure the voltage coming in and out of the lipower booster. It should be 3 to 4.2 on the input side and about 5 on the output side. Triple-check the polarity!
3) Get another multimeter, insert between the teensy and lipower and measure the current flowing.
It should be pretty low, less than 100mA.
4) Cut the connection between the teensy and the lipower. Hook up a 50 ohm resistor to the lipower and make sure that it still produces a steady 5 volts without heating up. Try it again with a 10 ohm resistor (now it may heat up a bit). Try hooking up a 5v bench power supply to the teensy instead of the lipower input and make sure that it boots, runs and draws a reasonable amount of current. (< 100mA) (Note that it can draw more than 100mA when audio is playing.)
Cutting and re-soldering is not a lot of fun, which is why connectors can help....
Hope this helps.
(PS, you can get super-cheap multimeters from harbor freight)