[George Hadley] developed a nice setup to control the color of a replica Lightsaber. A small PCB houses a PIC 18F2221 and three switching transistors for the colors. A powerful LED resides in the tip of the handle, lighting up the diffuser that makes up the blade. But our favorite part is the control scheme. He’s embedded a small RGB LED in the handle, giving feedback as to which color of light can currently be adjusted (red, green, or blue). One button scrolls through the colors and a slide potentiometer adjusts that them.
We wouldn’t go as far as calling this a Halloween prop, we think it’s better suited for serious replica builds. But it would make an amazing addition to the little one’s costume. See it in action after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POjmL48CssU]
Lol, now you got the choice of good and evil at your fingertips.
Not a fan of sabers, but i like the idea of the small rgb led to tell you which color you may adjust.
i dual wield my blue cold cathodes. they are only about a foot long and being tethered to a power supply limits their usefulness as lighsabers
Ok this is awesome. There is something to be said for “rapid prototyping”. Something to be said for deadbugging , bread boarding, Proto board etc . But nothing really compares to taking it to the true “prototype” level with pcb , smt parts, and a professional looking result.
CTMU – Charge Time Measurement Unit , used for capacitive touch i/o and more.
Using the CTMU unit and the chassis of the saber, I would imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to turn the entire handle into a capacitive touch “on off button”
If its in your hand its on, if its not its off. That on off switch has the OCD engineer in me twitching. :P
@Addidis – Thought about that actually. Looking to implement that in version 2 hopefully, stay tuned!
“a slide potentiometer adjusts that them.”
Um… what is it you’re trying to say?
Yeah that line broke ma noggin too.
syntax error
redo from start
It’s obviously an edit that didn’t get completely changed. Most likely from “adjusts that color” to “adjusts them”
Cool project. An absolutely awesome idea for v. 2.0 (or maybe 3) would be to switch out the slide pot for a track-pad or the like.
For a more even beam, I have seen people string LED’s together in parallel (literally stacked on top of each other.) I think that would make for a wonderful effect.
@Spork: I had tried that at first. Tragically, however, the leds were not manufactured with tight enough tolerances (or something) and the string looked more like christmas lights than a single, coherent color.