1999 Hasbro Electronic Qui-Gon Jinn Lightsaber board

[Matt Thorn]

Sorry for the awkward thread title, but I wanted to be as precise as possible. I just got hold of this, and am rather impressed. The sounds are pretty good, particularly when using a decent speaker. The fire-up/fire-down sound is more like a lock-up sound, but the idle hum is quite good. The clash randomly varies between a simple clash and a clash followed by a motion sound. There is no motion sensor, and therefore no motion sound. This sounds a lot better to me than the generic Jedi Force Action Lightsaber I inquired about here. (In that one, the idle hum sounds more like the rumbling of a massive dynamo than a lightsaber, and the motion sound is abrupt and annoying.)

Anyway, there are several varieties of Hasbro boards, but apart from this thread (which talks about combining it with a Corbin board), this particular variation hasn't been discussed much, so I thought I would add a basic wiring schematic and labeled photo of the board.



In one of the threads about Hasbro boards, someone said running a pre-LED Hasbro board with 4AAA batteries would fry it, but this one (which came with a generic flashlight bulb) seems to be working fine with the 4.8 volts coming from my battery pack.

On fire-up and fire-down, the light blinks three times, which some people might find annoying. I'm sure there's a way to bypass the board and hook the light up directly to the battery pack, but that's beyond my electronics knowledge (which is kindergarten level). Maybe someone could post a schematic for that kind of setup here.

BTW, the hilt on this product is surprisingly nice, and fairly true to real thing. If you want a lightweight hilt to hang from your belt for a costume, this is perfect. Earlier, I had bought a Rubies' Qui-Gon saber toy for precisely that purpose, but it looked awful. I now have a beautiful Qui-Gon saber custom made for me by DoClo, but I'm going to hang on to this hilt for possible costuming purposes.

Now I'd like to come up with a schematic for this that includes a charge port. If someone beats me to it, by all means please post it here.

P.S.: I thought I had overpaid for this (I got it for 1800 yen, or $18.90 U.S., on Yahoo! Auctions Japan), but I see one going for $34.98 U.S. on Amazon.com, and another on eBay U.K. with a Buy It Now price of £14.99 ($23.08 U.S.), so I guess I did pretty well.