Hey there Saber-smiths,

I'm still fairly new to these boards, and time limited so I apologize in advance if there's lots of other threads on this subject with working sabers. I didn't see any when I glanced around though. I wanted to share the findings of my work with Erv' Plecter on making a Clash Flash saber.

First off, I gotta say. Erv' is one awesome guy. After only a few short mails he took some time out of his day to chat with me on Skype about this idea. I'm an Engineer doing prototype design for Intel on both hardware and software so we are able to talk shop on his board. We settled on an idea to use one of the blink LED outputs as the logic driver, and I would wire up a small transistor circuit to drive the 2 white Luxeon LED's based on those outputs. Erv' had to customize his firmware a bit and work out some bugs, then I purchased one of his boards and he sent it to me with the custom firmware.

Quick note, I purchased my saber hilt-tube, blade, tip, switches, and many other parts from the Custom Saber Shop. Gotta make sure to give credit to the owner of these killer forums!

This is a rough drawing of how I have the optics set up in my current saber. It's functional, but does not get much light up the blade as expected. I'm working now to figure out a better mounting option. The main problem is not having room to place an optic lens on top of the white Luxeon LED's because it will block light from the main Luxeon LED.

In the next few weeks I'll be testing around with adding aluminum foil to try and reflect more light up the blade, and I'll also try shaving some material off the surface of rounded LED's to see if I can get more light to exit on a certain angle.

As you might expect, the clash-flash works but it's not nearly as bright as I'm going for YET. I will get there, I'm positive of that. It's just a matter of time until I work out a cheap and effective solution. It's very hard to see the current clash-flash with the blade inserted on video. But when I remove the blade you can see the clash-flash pretty well in the empty emitter tube. In real life, you can definitely see the clash-flash very easily. My current goal though... is to have the entire saber flash nearly twice as bright as a full on main Luxeon K2 LED.

Here is a picture of my current finished prototype saber:

I'm working on getting some video's ready right now. I'll post them on YouTube hopefully soon.

Here is a picture of my designs for the next hilt, to be custom machined later:


Here is the web-based machine shop who I'm planning on going with to have my next saber hilt made. You can download their software, enter your design and get instant quotes!
http://www.emachineshop.com/

I absolutely LOVE the Crystal Focus v2.1 board, and Novastar's killer sound files for it. Big props goes out to those guys so far on their work.

Here's a picture of me with a few of my Master Replicas, what got me started in all this crazyness.

So... what do you guys think? Like it so far? Already been done? Excited to see how it goes? Want to see it in action (video)?