Stock Ion board - advanced adjustment ZDSPB.com > Tech index > SP Ion > Adjusting and maintaining > Electronics adjustment > Stock Ion board advanced

Note: This is only a guide for HOW to adjust the board. Information regarding WHAT to set adjustments at can be found on the Setting Electronics and Pressure mainpage.

Upgrading: This is the current version of the stock board. No upgrades are necessary.
Basic Information: This page contains detailed information on the operation of the stock board and its many adjustments. A more basic page, with clear-cut instructions and simple information, can be found here.

Board Operation:
The electronics in the Ion use two small tactile switches (buttons) to operate: the power button and the programming button. The power button is accessible right behind the top of the trigger; push the ION jewel to actuate it. The gun is designed so you won't have to push very hard on the jewel to work the button. Sometimes the circuit board components don't line up perfectly and you'll have to press a little harder. Every Ion is different so you'll have to experiment with yours to see how hard you have to push it.
The programming button is located on the surface of the circuit board when you remove the left side of the grips. This is only used to adjust the electronic settings on the board.

Programming

To turn the marker on, press and hold the power button for two seconds. The LED will light red (green if UK board) and you are now in Vision mode, ready to fire. You can toggle between Vision on and off by pressing the power button anytime you wish. To deactivate the board, hold the power switch in until the LED turns solid red. You can then release the button and the board will power down.

LED Patterns:
The red LED behind the Ion jewel denotes the status of the board during gameplay.
Non-Vision mode: two rapid blinks each second (blink blink, pause, blink blink).
Vision mode, ready to fire: continuous blinking, four times each second (blink blink blink blink blink).
Vision mode, no ball loaded: one blink each second (blink, pause, blink, pause)
While in Vision mode, the marker will only fire if the eyes are blocked, which signifies that a paintball has loaded and is ready to fire. All the related Vision settings and timings are non-adjustable so you don't have to worry about delay, holdoff, or anything else (some aftermarket boards allow these to be adjusted).

Programming:
To adjust any of the settings on the circuit board, you must remove the left side of the grips (or the entire grips, it doesn't matter) and push the programming switch (button) once. There are two additional LEDs located under the grips as well (yellow and red). When you enter programming mode, the yellow LED will light up. As is explained shortly, this signifies being in the first adjustment mode. Pushing the programming button will cycle through the six adjustment modes, each with its own LED color/pattern. This list explains the adjustment modes:
Solid yellow - Dwell up
Solid red - Dwell down
Single blink yellow - Recharge up
Single blink red - Recharge down
Double blink yellow - Fire mode up
Double blink red - Fire mode down

To adjust any of the settings, select which adjustment mode you want by the LED pattern and color. For any of the patterns, yellow increases the setting whereas red decreases it. Once you have selected which adjustment to make, push the power switch (button) to adjust it by one interval. Each time you adjust it by pressing the power button, the opposite color LED will blink one time to signify it has been adjusted once. You can also hold it down if you want to go faster, and simply count the number of blinks. At some point the LED will stop blinking; this signifies you have reached the maximum/minimum setting (explained in each adjustment section on this page).
To find out what the setting is currently set to, decrease it all the way and count the number of times the LED blinks. When it stops blinking, you've hit the bottom. Whatever number you counted was the current setting. Now you will have to increase it back up to your new amount.

To exit the programming mode, push the trigger. After pushing the trigger, turn the board off to save the settings. If you pull the battery, the new setting will revert back to whatever it was last set to.

There is no way to "reset" the board back to the stock settings.

Dwell: LED solid
Dwell is the amount of time that the solenoid remains open (measured in milliseconds, or ms for short), which translates to how long the bolt will stay forward. This determines the length of time that the marker's valve will release pressurized air to fire the paintball. Increases in dwell will generally increase your velocity as well, though there are working limits to this.
Dwell is adjusted in half-millisecond intervals; the lowest dwell setting is 8-ms whereas the highest is 52-ms. This means the lowest setting on the board is 8-ms, first setting up is 8.5-ms, then 9-ms, 9.5-ms, etc etc. The stock dwell setting is 52 blinks from the bottom (34-ms). We don't recommend you adjust the dwell unless you wish to spend time and air fine-tuning the marker to possibly receive better performance. If you accidentally adjust your marker's electronics and now the gun doesn't fire, readjust the dwell to 52 and try again.
For information on recommended dwell settings, refer to the electronics and pressure setting page.

How long is my dwell time, in milliseconds, if I have it set to blinks from the bottom?

Recharge: LED single blink
Recharge rate is the term we use to describe the length of time after the dwell has expired, before the marker will be allowed to fire again. Because of this defination, increases in recharge time will lengthen the resting stage between shots, thus decreasing your maximum rate of fire (and vice-versa). Recharge is only used to determine the max ROF for the marker; it has nothing to do with consistency, efficiency, recoil, or any other factor. All it will do is slow down or speed up your maximum cycling speed. It has no influence on how the marker fires at all. You're only adjusting the ROF, so the gun will fire the exact same regardless of where its set (basically). People seem to have a very difficult time understanding this, so I'm hoping that me stating it five times just now will help.
This is a diagram of the firing cycle with adjustments:
Firing cycle diagram
The diagram shows that when you increase your dwell setting, the recharge will stay the same, thus the ROF will be lower since the firing cycle takes longer. To compensate you need to then lower the recharge. This is an example and uses example numbers.

Recharge is adjustable between 25 and 70 milliseconds, in half-millisecond increments (making 90 adjustments total). The recharge time is then added to your dwell setting to determine how fast your marker will fire. The minimum speed with stock dwell is roughly 9.6-bps, whereas the fastest speed is 17-bps (stock Ion boards). Using the recharge setting, it is possible to "tell" the board to fire faster than 17-bps, however in those cases the board will simply default the speed down to 17, because it's capped at that speed and won't let you fire faster.

If you wish to "cap" the marker at any particular speed, you must reference the speed using an Ion BPS chart like this one.

Fire Mode: LED double blink
The Ion is equipped with four fire modes, in this order from highest to lowest:
Fullyautomatic: Continuous firing at 10-bps as long as the trigger is compressed.
Three-shot burst: Fires three shots at 10-bps for each single trigger pull.
Rebound ramping: Increases the ROF to the maximum setting (using recharge) once you fire 5-bps or faster.
Semiauto: One shot per trigger pull, legal in every semi-only tournament.

To adjust your fire mode, select double blink red to set the board to semiauto. Now select double blink yellow and push it one time for rebound, two times for three-shot, or three times for fullyauto.
Fullyauto and three-shot are only available in the United States. UK version boards don't have them.
Fullyauto and three-shot are capped at 10-bps and can't be adjusted.

Demonstrational Videos:
Video showing the settings adjustment on the Ion. In this video the current dwell setting is 30, then was adjusted down to 15.
Please note! This isn't a video to show you "where to set your dwell at". This is just a demonstrational video to show HOW to adjust the board. Don't autoamtically set your gun to 15 just becuase I did it in this video.
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Adjusting the fire mode on the Ion.
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