Clone Wars Ultimate Lightsaber - How-to-wire guide

[eastern57]

Clone Wars Ultimate Lightsaber Sound Board

This is a quick, down & dirty wiring diagram for the Clone Wars Ultimate Lightsaber:

A few things to point out first:

- The light source is a ring of 9x High Brightness 5mm LED (3 Red, 3 Green, 3 Blue)

- 3 distinct "sound fonts" (we'll call them: *ROTJ, *SITH, *HASBRO)

- Similar the SW-616, the sound fonts match the three colors
-- Green to ROTJ
-- RED to SITH
-- Blue to HASBRO

- The board supplies +/- 100mA to the light source (only lights one color at a time). It's sufficient to "light" a Lux3, but just barely...

- The default setting for board alternates between the 3 colors/sound fonts, on each activation, unless a "crystal" is used (in this order: HASBRO, ROTJ, SITH).

- Separate PCB has three momentary switches - one per sound font. When one is held down, the board will only sctivate that sound font. When two are held down, the board will alternate between the two. In the saber, the crystals are what hold the momentary buttons down, if you're using the board in a custom, mom switches should be replaced with latching switches.

- Clash/Swing sensor is located on "emitter PCB" (white cylinder).

- Album of the internals (guts): http://s306.photobucket.com/albums/n...tern57/Hasbro/


*ROTJ - Has the distinct ROTJ activation sound
*SITH - Distince Sith activation/deactivation and hum (think Anakin & Ventress in the Yavin rain)
*HASBRO - Classic Hasbro sounds in all it's crappy glory



Color Coded wiring chart:





White Dots:

Yellow wire - common return for the 3 momentary switches (brown/white/red - switches don't have polarity)

Brown wire - momentary switch that selects ROTJ sound w/Green LED/wire

White wire - momentary switch that selects HASBRO sound w/Blue LED/wire

Red wire - momentary switch that selects SITH sound w/RED LED/wire

Orange wire - Clash sensor #1 (works with white wire)



Magenta Dots:

Red wire - Negative (-) for Red LEDs, activates w/SITH

Blue wire - Negative for Blue LEDs, activates w/HASBRO

Green wire - Negative for Green LEDs, activates w/ROTJ

White wire - Clash sensor #2 (works with orange wire)

Black wire - Negative from battery pack




Cyan Dots:

Black wire - Common Positive (+) for LEDs (red wire. green wire, blue wire). yes, I know it's black, but it's still the positive

Red wire - Positive (+) from battery pack



Yellow Dots: speaker connections (no polarity, doesn't matter which is which)



Good Luck!


eastern57

[FenderBender]

Eastern, you said that it only supplies 100ma at a time to the light source, but is that without considering when a mom switch is depressed and lights more than one color?

[Darth Leximus]

So let me see if I grasp this....

If I wanted to run this for sound only, with a seperate puck for the LED, I could remove all wires pertaining to the leds, leave the orange and white for the clash sensor, wire up the battery and speaker accordingly and finally wire a new switch to the one thats on the board and this should work in such a way that every time I cycle the saber on and off it will cycle through the 3 different sound fonts.

Sound about right?

[Novastar]

It does sound right (although I don't have a board to confirm that)... but I will at least say... you COULD use the boards's LED leads for "accent" LEDs. Seeing as they are already there... not a bad way to go.

[eastern57]

... but is that without considering when a mom switch is depressed and lights more than one color?

It will not run more than one color at a time. Think of it as 3 modes: it will only run in one mode at a time. One Hundred milliamps is an average.

So let me see if I grasp this....

If I wanted to run this for sound only, with a seperate puck for the LED, I could remove all wires pertaining to the leds, leave the orange and white for the clash sensor, wire up the battery and speaker accordingly and finally wire a new switch to the one thats on the board and this should work in such a way that every time I cycle the saber on and off it will cycle through the 3 different sound fonts.

Sound about right?

Yes. But in addition to keeping the orange and white wires, you'd have to keep the sensor too - it controls both the swings and the clashes.

It does sound right (although I don't have a board to confirm that)... but I will at least say... you COULD use the boards's LED leads for "accent" LEDs. Seeing as they are already there... not a bad way to go.

My Guy - Always thinking! It's actually perfect for that!

[NewberL337]

And just to be sure this Clone Wars Ultimate Lightsaber is the kit for $35 that has all the different little pieces you need to customize different sabers right? Cause I planned on buying one of those at some point and guttin' it.

[Clockwork]

It will not run more than one color at a time.

If you put more than one crystal in it, it will activate both colours. So both Blue and Green LED's will turn on if you have the blue and green crystal in it. At least that is how it is with mine.

[Matt Thorn]

First, allow me to apologize for cross-posting this to three threads, but I think it's pertinent to all three.

I just got my LedEngin RGGB and RGBA LEDs today packed liked precious jewelry. And I finally hit on what I think should be a good working solution for the elusive Clone Wars Ultimate Lightsaber conversion that preserves both the sound and light functions of the original. I'm posting my tentative wiring diagram here in the hope that more experienced sabersmiths can check it for flaws. Since the LedEngin LEDs are not particularly cheap, I don't want to experiment with them till I'm 99.99% sure that I at least won't fry them.

This uses the CWUL board, a LedEngin RGGB (LZ4-20MC10), a Corbin driver, three latching DPDT switches (one for each color, replacing the three push-to-make switches held down by the crystals), and one momentary DPDT switch (for turning the saber on and off). It seems to me that if the wiring diagram Eastern posted works, this one should work, too.



EDIT: The wiring for the green LEDs was wrong in the diagram. This is a corrected diagram.

BTW, the latching switches for the colors that I'm thinking of using light up in their respective colors when activated, and have a diameter of 7.4mm (0.29").

NOTE: Like all the Hasbro "toy" sabers (and even the earliest FX sabers), the Clone Wars Ultimate Lightsaber has a time-out function that kicks in if the clash sensor has not been activated for about a minute. Obviously, the Corbin driver has no such function. So if the sound side times out, the LED will remain on, and next time you push the momentary switch (I'm assuming--I haven't actually tested it), the LED will turn off, and the sound will turn on! If that happens, you could just let it time-out again, and then the Hasbro board and Corbin board will be back in sink, but if you don't want to do that, the only solution I can think of is a kill switch, either in a recharge port or as a separate "push-to-break" reset button. (As if this thing won't have enough switches--four at last count--as is.)

[Matt Thorn]

I finished my CWUL lightsaber and posted some pics and a video here.

I just thought subscribers to this thread might be interested to know that I seem to have discovered a bug in the CWUL sound board. Color mixing works fine for a while, but after a certain number of switches, red seems to become dominant, and anytime the red LED is active, the green and/or blue LEDs will not light up. At first I thought this was a problem in my wiring, but I find that if I turn it off and leave it off for a while, it returns to normal. The problem only occurs when red is activated. Green and blue still mix to make cyan.

In the original CWUL toy, you need to pop open a door and swap crystals to change colors (unless you have no crystals in, in which case the saber rotates through combinations each time you hit the activation switch), so color changes are not something you can do every few seconds. With my setup, though, you can change colors instantly, just by pressing one or more of the three color switches on the hilt. I'm thinking that this repeated changing of colors in a short amount of time triggers a bug in the board that prevents blue and green from mixing with red. To confirm this, though, I would need to try it out on an unmodified CWUL, which I no longer have. Anyone care to test this theory?

For all I know, it may be the Corbin board, or the resistor on the red LED, or just some defect in my wiring that I can't see. Since even Crystal Focus and UltraSound boards have bugs, though, it would not be surprising if a Hasbro board had a bug like this, particularly since it would be unlikely to show up in regular use of the toy.

[psab keel]

An impressive setup to say the least! I am currently planning out the schematics for a lightsaber using this same CWUL board, and I found that using a sensor that would normally be used to detect motion on a lightsaber sound board (replacing the normal clash sensor on the hasbro board) will allow the board to register a clash. This way it will allow the board to stay on longer (by sensing a clash) and not shut off after one minute of inactivity.

The down side to this is that it will register clashes merely by moving the saber, and not necessarily from impact. But considering that the board has its swing sounds and clash sounds tied together in the design (a major flaw in my opinion) it is the only solution that I have been able to come up with.

But as another plus, the thing that I discovered is that by using a motion sensor instead of a clash sensor, you have the unique feature of some of the clash sounds repeating several times, essentially giving you some unique clash sound effects.

It's kind of hard to describe in words, but when I put my saber together I'll shoot a video and post in on you tube to show you what I'm talking about.