Novus Animus
Novus Animus
Features:
Ramp-up/Ramp-down
Flash-on-Clash
136 Color settings
4 blade flicker settings
Sound (Hasbro, Ultimate FX)
Background:
I wanted a lightsaber that was capable of changing colors to suit my mood. I'd seen many 7-color sabers out there, and those are cool, but I didn't want to have extra switches on my hilt and you are limited to 7 colors. Then I saw a YouTube video of a guy who installed some potentiometers so he could fade each color of an RGB LED individually. That was really neat, but had the same problem with extra controls. Some time later, I saw a video of someone who put a PIC controller in his saber and was able to adjust the colors with a single slide or dial. "Now we're getting somewhere!" I thought to myself.
I was already familiar with the Arduino platform. I'd toyed around with it in the past, but never really did anything complex with it. This was my chance to dig a little deeper. I had an Arduino Nano lying around and I knew I could fit it in a 1.5" sink tube, so I used that. I have a background in software development, so the coding part of the project was a cake walk for me. It was a little more involved then I thought it would be, but not bad. I just had to figure out how to wire everything up. So, I got out my breadboard and got to work.
I selected a Rebel Tri-star RGB LED for this project for their (relative to some others) easy wiring. Solder pads were still pretty tiny for my fat iron, but I managed it without too many issues. A word of advice: You want very "bendy" wire for these. The first wire I tried was too thick and didn't bend well, so I couldn't get the star mounted on the heatsink properly because the wire kept flexing and pushing the star off the copper. The wire I bought from TCSS worked wonderfully.
Now I needed to power each LED (Red, Green, and Blue) individually. This is what I came up with: Three MOSFETs wired like so: Gate goes to Arduino Nano output. Source goes to ground. Drain goes to LED negative with current limiting resistor for each LED.
I test fired all of the LEDs by driving them with direct power and resistors. They worked great! That's a TCSS battle blade, BTW. I was surprised by how well the colors blended to give me a white color.
I plugged the MOSFETs into the Arduino Nano and ran a small test program to play with color tuning. Some colors looked great, some were kind of meh, but the power of possibilities made for a sweet moment.
I got all of the LED control and color-mixing algorithms coded and tested over the course of a week or so in my spare time. Now I needed to add sound. I didn't want to spend too much, so I harvested a cheapie sound board from an Ultimate FX Anakin. I read some advice from this forum and some others, watched a YouTube video, and finally did some probing with my multimeter. It was pretty straight forward to figure out. Sorry, I forgot to take any pictures of it. I will say this: All of the inputs are the "pull-low" kind of inputs. By this, I mean the input is triggered if they are pulled to ground. Knowing this, I was able to integrate the sound board with the Arduino by using a switching transistor. After a little testing, I was able to wire up a TCSS premium speaker to the board and have my micro-controller activate/deactivate sound whenever I wanted! In short, I integrated the LED control and sound control subsystems.
Great, so now I had a full featured set of internals. Time to build a hilt! I wanted a fairly long hilt. Something brutish and almost primitive, but still high-tech-looking. I wanted a two-handed bashing weapon. Something you could wield like an ax! Think Scottish claymore, but not as long. I was inspired by the final moments of Luke's fight with Vader in ROTJ where he's hacking and bashing away at Vader before finally ending it. Anyway, this is what I came up with.
After a little paint on the PVC overlays, add some O-rings and electrical tape, and we're ready for the beauty shots!
I programmed the software to allow for 136 different color settings. That ought to be enough to suit any mood. To photograph them all would take a really long time, but here is a sample.
I may upload a YouTube video a little later showing how it works. Basically, I added a "color select" mode where you can change the color by pressing the activation switch. You get there by holding the activation switch in for 10 seconds, then back out of it the same way. I also added flash-on-clash (white), and 4 blade flicker settings. The advantage of this setup over some others is that it's easy to change the color without the usual annoyances that typically go along with doing so (pulling chips, plugging in USB, multiple switches, etc.). I like the idea of a hilt being basically one big gripping surface as much as possible.
I've built a simple sink tube saber a few years back (Lux III Amber, resistor set-up), but this is my first serious build. I hope you enjoy the pics/story as much as I enjoyed this challenging and rewarding project. Thanks to everyone here on these TCSS boards. I've read your advice and viewed your work with respect and admiration for years. All the while I was dreaming of the day I could jump in to this hobby again. I don't know when I'll bulid another, but I'm looking forward to it... maybe something a little easier next time... maybe not!
UPDATE 02-14-2013: Adding video showing how it works. Project was WIP in the video, but demonstrates functionality.
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Originally Posted by JakeSoft
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