High/Low beam lightsaber?

[Cern]

Hey there. This is just a hypothetical question, but I wanted to throw it out there.

would there be a way to install a switch, that when pressed, would *temporarily* ramp up the brightness of an LED?

I was thinking of something from a TALES OF THE JEDI comic, where (I think) Exar Kun uses the Force to more or less overclock his lightsaber to cut through some saber-resistant metal... I figured a good real-life approximation would be to overdrive the LED for a bit.

The only thing i can think of is maybe bypassing a resistor or just running the LED at a lower power level normally but running at full-power for the special effect.

[RevengeoftheSeth]

There are flashlight drivers out there (I have one, myself) that has a High/Low setting that you can switch through.

[Bothrops]

The only thing i can think of is maybe bypassing a resistor or just running the LED at a lower power level normally but running at full-power for the special effect.

Yeah, you could switch between 2 circuits of different resistance. One drawback of that is that your "normal" mode of operation is less bright than the saber could be, and we all know how we lean towards having the brightest saber possible at all times...

Another approach might be to use Pulse Width Modulation (or similar concept) circuit design. The principle here is to have the power to the LED pulse at a high frequency so that the human eye can't distinguish it from "ON all the time". Perceptive dimming can be achieved by decreasing the frequency of the pulses. There are drawbacks of course, a discussion of which you can read here: http://superpositioned.com/2006/03/0...light-with-pvc

Also, it's more stuff to cram into a saber handle.

[FenderBender]

Probably the best way to do this, would be to use a 10W solid color LEDengin LED in the color you want, say red for example. Wire two dice in series for the main blade, and wire the other two in series in parallel on a separate driver hooked to a momentary switch that allows you turn on all four dice for a much brighter blade. Better use good AW cells or at least the 18650 sized trustfires in order to handle the discharge rate.