Lightsaber
I made this project for my CSC 235 class. I have always thought that I could make a good lightsaber and wanted to try it so this was the perfect opportunity to do so. The lightsaber blade is made out of a 60 neopixel strip and has a usb plug on the end. The plug allows it to be detachable from the handle. The blade is powered using an arduino nano. To turn the lightsaber on and off there is a button on the hilt. The button is not connected directly to the arduino but is instead connected to the pcb of a cheap lightsaber toy. This allows the lightsaber to have sound as well. The arduino is connected into the light output of the board which tells it when to turn on the neopixels.
The lightsaber has 5 different states in total. The first two states are controlled with the button and are the blade turning on and off. The other three states are the three color patterns, red, green and blue. These states can be switched through using the potentiometer. Each color has a slightly different pattern. The red setting flickers randomly throughout the blade, the green setting sends a pulse up through the blade, and the blue setting sends a pulse of a random speed up through the blade. The arduino board is mounted on the bottom of the hilt which is where the lightsaber is plugged in for power. The location of the board also makes it very easy to reprogram which could be used to add more states in more colors.
The hilt was 3d printed in two parts that I then glued together. The blade was made by combining two blades from the cheap toy lightsabers that I bought for the soundboard. At the bottom of the blade I connected a 3d printed attachment piece that capped it off and held the usb plug. Inside the hilt there are a few laser cut circles/bars that hold the usb port and the arduino. There are also two laser cut rings that go around the blade to stabilize it against the handle. For the grip at the base of the handle I used a car windshield wiper blade that I cut to size and then glued on.
