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[on:]

Hello there!

I wanted to share a project I've been working on for some months by now. It's about building a lightsaber replica toy, with sound and light effects, like the original ones already being sold, thought this one is built with the electronics effects powered by an Arduino Core, and it's mostly done with common materials, except for a few things that are bought from a specialized store.

The electronics consists in a custom PCB with a common Arduino configuration (mega328, 16Mhz, bootloader, etc..) and coupled with a slightly modified Ladyadas' Waveshield circuit.

So far I think it's going pretty neat. The sound effects are ok, but I'm working on enhance them. It still does not produce the extend/retract blade effect, because it does not use a string of LED, it only has one Luxeon LED at the base of a empty blade; I did it that way because it's the preferred method in the custom lightsaber construction scene, but I'm very disappointed with the result, so I'll be changing it to drive led strings with the whole set of effects.

You can see the video at:
http://youtu.be/1xnPlv4SSVc

Check the whole schematic and design at my website:
http://www.cero-uno.com/projects/lightduino/lightduino.html
(give it a few seconds to load or try a couple time, it's a home based webserver)

Regards
 

[Reply #1 on:]

Beautiful work.

[Reply #2 on:]

Very nice work! Instead of using a string of LED's to achieve the extend retract effect why not fade your LED on and off? If you watch this video around 40 seconds or so (if you don't want to watch the whole thing) I have my LED fade on one side then the other this could easily fade back out. But you can see the way the light moves through my light ring. This was done with 2 LED's, one on each side of the ring, just a thought anyway might save you some time.

[Reply #3 on:]

Very nice work! Instead of using a string of LED's to achieve the extend retract effect why not fade your LED on and off? If you watch this video around 40 seconds or so (if you don't want to watch the whole thing) I have my LED fade on one side then the other this could easily fade back out. But you can see the way the light moves through my light ring. This was done with 2 LED's, one on each side of the ring, just a thought anyway might save you some time.

You have excellent taste in music. I couldn't stop it once I started it and was disappointed it didn't finish.

[Reply #4 on:]

Very nice work! Instead of using a string of LED's to achieve the extend retract effect why not fade your LED on and off? If you watch this video around 40 seconds or so (if you don't want to watch the whole thing) I have my LED fade on one side then the other this could easily fade back out. But you can see the way the light moves through my light ring. This was done with 2 LED's, one on each side of the ring, just a thought anyway might save you some time.

You have excellent taste in music. I couldn't stop it once I started it and was disappointed it didn't finish.

LOL Thanks, yeah I didn't think people would want to watch my demo cycle through a 3rd time

[Reply #5 on:]

Very nice work! Instead of using a string of LED's to achieve the extend retract effect why not fade your LED on and off? If you watch this video around 40 seconds or so (if you don't want to watch the whole thing) I have my LED fade on one side then the other this could easily fade back out. But you can see the way the light moves through my light ring. This was done with 2 LED's, one on each side of the ring, just a thought anyway might save you some time.

Indeed you've got the fade effect quite achieved. Yes, I still got to try that one. It might look like it's not too difficult, that is just a PWM, however, the wave playing it's very CPU consuming, once I attempted to do it so, just pretty much straight forward (led_fade++) and the sound got laggy during that phase. So I got to do it carefully. I think a led string it'll be harder to build and control, that's why I want to try that first, but of course, fading the led of the base is a must try, beside, it gives the advantage of no electronics in the blade, better for sparring =D

[Reply #6 on:]

Why not run an arduino for sound, and one for lighting? You could always use an ardweeny if space is an issue.