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Rivenshield
04-11-2010, 11:17 PM
After two months' worth of diligent lurking, I decided try and build a custom lightsaber for my godson's birthday. Lucked out (I thought) and purchased an FX sound card still in the original housing. It's a Luke ROTJ, which I understand is identical to the Mace Windu card (pictured).

Problem is, it arrived without the wire harness leading to the LED. There's just a white plastic socket with seven tiny metal prongs.

Is this one of those caveat-emptor learning-curve things? Or is there a way for me to retrieve my failure to look up my specific make/model of board *before* I purchased it?

Novastar
04-12-2010, 01:51 AM
Riven... if you flip the board over, you'll note that there are solder points (sort of with "tips") that are essentially what those pins are all about.

So what you can do (since you don't have the male connector):

* solder some wires to all of those points...
* in the case of the "negative bundle"... you can join all of those wires together--as they originally made distinctions between LED sections for the "LED ladder/array" scroll effect--which won't be happening anymore (duh)
* make a quick disconnect if you like, regarding the positive/clash sensor connection & your new "negative bundle" which is now converged into one lead/wire
* Done.

So... in a nutshell, the white connector was simply for convenience--and you'll essentially "replace it" via your own means. Or mine. Or whatever. :)

FenderBender
04-12-2010, 04:42 AM
Yeah, harness not neccessary. Buck puck isn't neccessary either, especially if you want to overdrive an LED or you have an LED that wants more than 1A.

Obi-Dar Ke-Gnomie
04-12-2010, 09:42 AM
You don't even need to solder a wire to each of the negatives. You can just bridge the tips together with solder, and use one negative wire.

Rivenshield
04-12-2010, 02:22 PM
Lovely; lovely. This is my first saber, as I said, and I hadn't bothered to dismount it from the factory housing yet. If I can (carefully) get by without the factory wire harness, that's all I need. I'll be using a cyan blue Luxeon III, which I believe draws about the same as the original green string of LED's so I don't have to fiddle around with resistors, and pop in some rechargeable batteries so Ben doesn't have to bug his parents to buy more batteries every two weeks.

Thanks folks. I'll post pics when I'm done.