Hello World

Light Up Lightsabers

So here's my first ever post, just a really quick summary of everything I have attempted so far and how it went, it's a little technical - I'll take some time in my later posts to really explain the jargon and how/why it works.

I have been trying to create a lego light up lightsaber for quite some time now. In the past I have tried using 1mm LED's in the hilt, but these produced next to no light. 

I have also tried using 0.5mm and 0.75mm fibre optic cable to carry the light from a 3mm ultra bright LED through the hilt and into the blade, but I found the fibre optic cable too brittle and not flexible enough. Also the fibre optic cable bled some light, to hide this I covered the fibre optic cable with heatsthrink. It worked ok, but the lack of flexibility eventually knocked out this option. However feeding the fibre optic cable into the 'blade' itself produced a much superior lighting effect than simply lighting from below, I'll try to re-incorporate this in some way in a later revision, see the photo below.

Fibre optic light up lightsaber in broad daylight.

I have finally settled with an idea I borrowed from  http://lifelites.com, which is to place a tiny tiny SMD LED inside the hilt and run a thin cable out the back - it works really well. The SMD LED's are absolutely tiny! I settled for a 0805 package size, which is near enough to 2mm x 1mm. The photo below shows just how small they are.

After alot of frustration I managed to solder the LED to the wires and run a cable into the 2x2 block which houses a resistor, this is connected to a PP3 cable (a 9V battery connector) and works reasonably well. I have only completed it tonight so excuse the grainy photos from my phone, but here is the end result.

So that is the progress to date, in the next couple of posts I'll try and fill in what has been about 3 years of on and off attempts to make a light up lego lightsaber.

Enjoy,

CD