Joule Thief as a Driver?

[Whosle]

Hi folks,

I was wondering if anyone has considered attempting to use a joule thief to drive the LED's in a saber blade?

Would there be any increases in battery life? I doubt that it would be able to power a speaker as well, but for a simple LED strip blade, it might be good. I know that Joule thief development is for tinkerers and hobby folks, some electricians think that they are silly , and can be substituted with solid state smart chips.

Here are a few links showing what folks are able to do with the joule thief.

https://youtu.be/NvXmXrCrI8I

https://youtu.be/W6URYyjKYx4

http://laserhacker.com/

I hope I don't get banned for posting direct links.

Just a thought.

Cheers
-whosle

[jbkuma]

The main reason this won't be worth it is because the batteries just don't have the run time, especially if you are taking extra amps to bump the voltage, no matter how much extra juice the circuit pries from the batter. Second, you cannot use this with rechargeables which is pretty much a non-starter. Even the best 18650 is only $15. Recharge that a couple times and you've made your money back, your lightsaber will run longer and not need to be taken apart constantly for new batteries, and most importantly of all nothing will explode.

LED strips are actually more hungry than the standard star LED. A fully powered 240LED strip blade (back to back 120 strips) will suck down around 14.5a. Even running at 40% power the is a bit of a dip when running off of my high quality 18650. While testing a 120 LED strip I managed to melt a bread board. If you are talking string blades, the voltage demand will be higher as well as the amps, though not as extreme in the amps department.