Luke ROTJ Hero Style RGBA color-changing
This is a color-changing Luke ROTJ Hero Style (Version 1) that I have finally finished after many months of struggle.
The hilt is one from Korbanth, modified in a couple of significant ways. First, the original Graflex clamp has been replaced with a "Hero Style" (a.k.a. Version 3) control box. Making that box was no picnic. The second modification was much simpler: I powder-coated the lower portion of the choke black in order to make it closer to the prop used in the film. And while I was at it, I put a coat of clear powder coating on the steel emitter, which otherwise would gather rust in the blink of an eye.
At first I tried salvaging a control box from a Force FX, but it looked awful. Then I tried designing one in CAD and having it 3D-printed by Shapeways. This also looked awful. Finally, I consulted with Acerocket, and he was able to sell me parts he had gathering dust. Getting all those parts together was pretty tricky.
Trickiest of all was packing in everything needed to make it a color-changing saber, with sound, while keeping the appearance as true to the film prop as possible.
Oh, and the little triangular LEDs on the control box are actual functioning LEDs.
I had originally wanted to make the rotary switch for the color-changing accessible through a hole in the black thingies on the side of the control box, but this proved physically impossible. So I ended up having the switch accessed by pushing the card forward.
The saber uses a Force FX Yoda soundboard and a LedEngin 10-Watt RGBA. If there is a way in a set-up like this to prevent red and amber from hogging current, I don't know what it is. (Giving the limited space, putting Buckpucks on each chip was not an option!)
There are four chips on the LED, so the number of possible on-off configurations is 16. One of those is "all off," so there are actually 15 colors. These are selected with a 16-position rotary switch. As you can see from the photos, several of the colors are barely distinguishable from each other, which is, again, a byproduct of the red and amber chips hogging current.
There is no charge port, because the gentleman I made it for wanted to be able to change batteries by hand. It uses four AAA batteries.
It may not be particularly stunning to look at, but after all the time, energy, and money I poured into this thing, you're going to see it whether you want to or not.
Here's a video of the saber.
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Originally Posted by jjshumpert
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