parts and crafts led lightsaber

Parts and crafts are community hacking spaces located in Somerset, Massachusetts.
We build East West with our children!
If you like this project, please check out our project and kit development Kickstarter where you can sign up for the kit or support only our work, project development and documentation.
This is a simple LED
Lit DIY lightsaber--
It is controlled by PVC and polycarbonate and uses magnet and reed switches to turn the LEDs off and on.
It\'s very easy to make, quite robust and looks great!
If you get your kit from us, you will have the following prepared materials.
Notes on how to prepare them yourself will be in the next steps.
1) handle
8 \"long piece\" PVC pipe with a diameter of 3/4, with a diameter of 40, there are two 1.
5 \"a long cut at a right angle to each other at one end. --A 1.
5 \"long 1\" PVC pipe with diameter of 1 is 40, cut by one side. --
A \"1 piece\" PVC pipe with a diameter of 3/4, with a cut on one side and a 3/8 hole on the other. --A 1.
A 25 \"block\" PVC pipe with a diameter of 1/2 and a diameter of 40 is cut through one side. --
A 3/4\" PVC end-cap --
A polycarbonate tube of 22 \"5/8 long\" outer diameter, 1/2 \"inner diameter, closed at one end. --Circuit1)
2 AA batteries-
2 x AA battery stand--4.
This battery pack is 25 \"3/4\" wide and fits 3/4 \"inside of PVC.
Wire lead length 6 \", we have connected women fast
Disconnect the terminal to the end. --
Add 4 \"reed switches for long wires.
We have welded the wire to one side of the reed switch and connected a female quick disconnect terminal at the other end of the wire and a female quick disconnect terminal
Disconnect the terminals on the other side of the reed switch. --
A string of parallel-welded LEDs-
22 inch long, 1 LED per inch.
We order these products in bulk from a dealer in China that produces toy LED swords.
The easiest way to get one of these without ordering 1000 PCs is to buy a cheap LED sword and take it apart.
The least wasteful way is to weld them together by yourself.
Or a 1/4 translucent diffuser to secure the LED chain.
We work with LED from China.
If you take apart an LED sword, you will find one of them.
Otherwise, a pile of straws is OK at a critical moment. What to Use?
In order to cut the PVC into length, we used a ratchet PVC cutter like this one ---
Almost any kind of hand saw can be used.
This combination of mitre boxes and saws is totally enough----
It may be helpful to use mitre box.
You may need to use some kind of saw in order to make other cuts.
PVC is very soft and relatively easy to cut, so almost any hand (or power)
The saw is fine as long as you are reasonably careful and able to clamp your work effectively.
We made these cuts with band saws in the woodworking shop.
Cut PVC to length you need to cut out from Schedule 40 PVC pipes: 1x8 \"3/4 in length\" diameter PVC1x1.
5 \"length of 1\" diameter PVC 1x 3/4 \"length of 1\" diameter PVC 1x 1.
25 \"length of 1/2\" diameter PVC what use?
You can cut the slots in the PVC pipe with almost any kind of hand saw or ratchet PVC cutter.
You can also use a variety of power tools with proper precautions. What to cut?
You need to find these lateral slots in both of your 1.
25 \"PVC length and 1/2\" PVC length.
Why are we cutting our spending?
The purpose of these cuts is to allow us to pull the PVC length slightly and make 1.
25 \"diameter length can be installed around the 3/4\" diameter handle, so PVC of 1/2 \"diameter can be installed around the polycarbonate tube blades. What to Cut?
With the saw, you will want to cut 2 slots, about 1, on the top of the lightsaber handle.
5 \"deep, 90\" rotates with each other.
This will divide the top of the handle into about 4 equal
The size part that can be folded or folded. Why?
By cutting these two slit into the handle, we can pull the top of the handle open and expand the top of the handle to allow the polycarbonate pipe blade with a 1/2 \"PVC collar to cling to the inside, as shown in the above figure.
What should I use?
You can use almost any type of drill bit for this step.
PVC pipes are very soft and easy to drill in. Where to Drill?
Drill a 5/8 hole into 1.
PVC 3/4 in diameter is 25 \"long \".
Drill the whole so that it is relative to the slot on the other side. Why?
This hole will allow you to place the 5/8 nd magnet inside and turn this magnet into a magnet holder that can slide up and down the handle of the lightsaber.
By moving the magnet up and down the handle of our lightsaber, we will turn on the reed switch that controls the LEDs. What am I doing?
In order for the slotted PVC collars to be easily mounted around what we want, we need to separate them a bit.
By further separating the collar and expanding the slot, we can install them around the PVC handle and the polycarbonate blade more easily.
What should I use?
This can be done with two pairs of pliers and a lot of force, but it will be much easier if you heat the PVC pipe first.
We heat the PVC pipe with a hot gun in the store because it\'s a bit fast, but you can actually use a hairdryer with high heat.
The hair dryer will not make the pipe hot enough to melt (which is good! )
But it will soften it and make it easier to bend.
We use hot guns like this. -
You can use almost any cheap hair dryer, like this: at a relatively low temperature in the hair dryer, you should still heat the plastic with sufficient ventilation.
Outdoors, or where the air flows a lot.
Of course, remember that what you \'ve heated is hot!
Always handle hot things with pliers. What am I doing?
We want to prevent the plastic diffuser from coming out of the front of the lightsaber when you swing it, and also make sure that the front of the blade does not have any sharp edges that might accidentally hurt someone in a duel.
What should I use?
To do this, we use a hot gun to melt and fold the top of the polycarbonate tube.
There are other things you can do. -
Polish down the sharp edges, then tape the ends, or with hot-
Glue, for example.
But we found that we could fold it up with a hot gun to make it look good. How?
It\'s hard to describe exactly how to do this-
You want to keep the tube moving when you heat it, so it is heated evenly.
Once hot enough to bend, you can clamp the front cover with a pair of pliers and fold both sides.
If you mess it up, you can always cut off the part you destroyed and try again.
Keep in mind that the hot gun is hot and the melted plastic is toxic.
Use enough ventilation equipment and be careful not to burn yourself. What am I doing?
For our kit, we are fast by connecting-
Disconnect the terminals so that people without soldering iron can easily assemble the kit together.
If you do this project yourself, the best thing to do is to weld these connections together.
If you don\'t want to do this, you can curl up on the fast disconnect terminals as we do, or you can simply wrap the wires tightly together to keep them stable.
How to connect the wire without welding. There are many different ways to connect wires without welding-
The complete explanation of how to do this is beyond the scope of this manual.
But here is a simple technique to wrap wires together.
If you want to use fast-
Disconnect the terminals and you can find a short and good press line guide here.
Although we recommend using a ratchet curling machine like this--use 22-180 guage, . 250\" width, 0.
032 \"thickness\" Red terminal of McMaster-Carr.
You can order here.
If you\'re using fast-
Disconnect and you want your kit to agree with our instructions, you will want to attach the following: 2x male terminals at both ends of the LED strand1x male terminals are located at one end of the reed switch2x female terminal, located in the length of the wire on the positive and negative poles connected to about 4 battery pack 1x female terminals, the other end is connected to the reed switch, the first thing we need to do is put the battery in the battery pack.
Make sure the battery is placed in the right way--with the flat (-)
Upward toward the spring and black line.
When it takes about 3 volts for your LED chain to light up, we use a battery pack that holds 2 1.
5 v aa batteries are connected in series.
There are two terminals in the LED string.
Your battery pack has 2 terminals.
Connect the LED terminals to the battery pack terminals very gently and loosely.
If the led lights up when the two connections, then you have the right direction.
Try another way if they don\'t. Why? LEDs are light-LEDs.
This means that they only allow the current to flow through them in one direction.
You can also judge which side of the LED chain is the front by carefully looking at a single LEDs.
Two small pieces of metal will be attached to the two leads inside the LEDs.
The lead on the front is usually a longer leg on the outside, connected internally to a smaller piece of metal, with a secondary lead
Negative lead is the opposite.
When testing, make sure that the metal parts connected separately do not come into contact unexpectedly--
If they do, you cause a short circuit, the LEDs don\'t turn on, and the whole thing starts to heat up.
Trouble Shooting if you can\'t make the LED Light Engine up, check the following no matter which side you are connecting: 1)
Make sure your battery is correct
Check a short-circuit.
The whole circuit is basically two-way. -
Power and ground.
The red line of each LED makes up one side of the front leg.
The negative legs of each LED make up another one.
If any part of the positive side of the circuit touches any part of the negative side, a short circuit occurs.
Make sure there is no LED leg cross in the chain and the terminals are separated from each other.
How should your lightsaber work. This is great!
But we don\'t want it on all the time.
To control whether the circuit is turned off or on, we will use a special switch called the reed switch.
Reed switch is a magnetic switch.
It consists of two magnetic conductive materials, separated by a very small distance in the sealing chamber.
When close to the magnetic field, these materials are pulled into contact with each other, connecting both ends of the reed switch (
And complete the circuit. )
You should have a complete circuit, the red line taken out of the battery pack is connected to the positive leg of the LED chain, and the black line taken out of the battery pack is connected to the negative leg.
You need to disconnect one of them.
No matter which one, but the pictures in the instructions let us disconnect the black line, so it would be easiest if you did the same.
Once you disconnect the line, you will have two free terminals, one for men and one for women, to connect the reed switch.
You want to connect the reed switch between these two terminals, so the wire connected to the reed switch is connected to the LED chain and the other side of the reed switch is connected to the battery pack.
This is a complete circuit with a switch in the middle.
If everything is OK, you should be able to turn on the led by placing the magnet near the reed switch.
Your Circuit should have a wire in the battery pack attached to your Reed switch.
There should be another length of wire coming from the other side of the reed switch and attached to the LED chain.
The other side of the LED chain should be connected to the battery pack.
Trouble Shooting if it doesn\'t work please try to move the magnet around the reed switch--
It may work better or worse from certain angles and distances.
If it still doesn\'t work, try taking the reed switch out and reconnect the LEDs directly to the battery pack.
If this causes the led to light up, re-insert the reed switch (
Be careful to avoid short-circuits)and try again.
If you have done this several times and it certainly doesn\'t work then you may have a broken reed switch that needs to be replaced.
Otherwise, the most likely criminals are the same as before ---
The battery is misplaced or short-circuited.
Check both issues.
Keep in mind that if your project does not work and starts to heat up significantly, you will almost certainly be short-circuited.
If this is the case, you should have the power cut immediately before searching for the short.
Protecting the reed switch is a bit flimsy part and when we swing it we want to make sure it doesn\'t damage inside our lightsaber handle.
The best way to do this is to connect it to the battery pack.
We do it with tape or a little bit of hot glue.
The reed switch consists of a black plastic housing with two metal leads on each side.
The battery pack is made of two wire brackets--
Small clip on the back that can be used to guide the wire.
Where you want to connect, you need to connect the reed switch in order to connect to the metal lead on the wire (
Connected to the LED chain)
Placed in the wire bracket closest to the led.
It won\'t fit snugly, but you can align the plastic case so it touches the wire holder.
Once you have positioned the reed switch, you want to tape it down.
Divide it in two positions. -
Around the point where the wires and reed switch leads are welded together, in the middle.
If you feel lost, you can also stick it to the other side. Why?
We have three goals.
We want to cover up a small amount of exposed metal in the connection to prevent short circuitcircuits.
We want to fix the reed switch in two places of the battery pack so that it does not rotate or easily bend or twist inside the lightsaber handle.
We want to make sure that the leads of the reed switches are relative to the back of the battery holder so that they do not bend.
Bending the reed switch lead is the easiest way to break the reed switch.
Assembling the blade polyester pipe will be the \"blade\" of the lightsaber \".
The LED chain is located inside the smaller diffusion plastic pipe and will be installed inside the polycarbonate pipe.
The bottom of the Polycarbonate tube will be installed in a 3/4 diameter PVC handle.
The problem is that the polycarbonate pipe is too small to fit comfortably into the PVC.
To keep it comfortably in the handle, we will attach a short length 1/2 diameter PVC around the bottom of the blade to increase its diameter.
The further problem to be done here is that 1/2 of PVC is not large enough to be installed around the polycarbonate pipe.
We cut a slot in 1/2 PVC that allows you to pull the pipe open and fit it tightly around the polycarbonate.
This can be a bit tricky, but you can do it, and once you do, you\'ll want to align the bottom of the polycarbonate tube with the bottom of the PVC so they\'re flush.
The handle of the assembled handle lightsaber will be made of 8 PVC with a diameter of 3/4, and two PVC collars with a diameter of 1 will slide around it. The larger collar will be used as a clip to secure the blade in place.
Second, the magnet for the smaller ring drilled a hole in it.
This is a magnet-
Bracket and slider.
This will be mounted on the handle and it is free to slide up and down.
By moving the slider up and down, we will move the magnet around the handle.
The proximity of the magnet to the reed switch on the battery pack inside the handle will determine whether the lightsaber is off or on.
To do this, it is much easier to put these collars on from the top of the handle, because you can fold these slit inwards to fit the collar around it.
Because of this, we wear the collar first before we insert the blade.
First slide the magnet holder onto the handle and then slide down.
You will slide down the handle with a larger diameter of 1 \"PVC length.
This larger length will be used as a clip to secure the polyester blade.
Connect the BladeNow and you can insert the polycarbonate tube blade into the PVC handle.
The slit that separates the top of the PVC handle can be pushed away or pried away so you can put the collar into the handle. How?
Push the blade collar down into the handle so that the collar on the blade is at least flush with the top of the handle, possibly a little below.
Now you can slide the larger PVC collar to the top of the handle so that it can cover the joint between the handle and the blade and clamp it firmly.
Also slide the magnet holder to the top.
Now that we \'ve built the circuits and handles, it\'s time to combine them!
But first, before we do that, we need to cover all of our exposed metal connections with a little vinyl tape to prepare the circuit.
This will prevent the connection from accidentally touching each other and causing a short circuit
When we plug the circuit into the handle, the circuit. Where to Tape?
The two connections you need the tape connection are the quick disconnect terminals where the LED chain is connected to the battery pack and reed switch.
Insert the blade into the handle and we need to slide the entire circuit into the lightsaber body through the bottom of the handle.
When you slide the battery pack into the handle, be careful with the reed switch--
It should be suitable for comfort while you don\'t have to use too much power.
Push the battery pack into as easily as possible.
Trouble Shooting if you find that the red insulation on the quick disconnect terminal extends too far from the main body of the battery pack to fit into the handle, you can gently smooth it with your fingers or pliers.
You don\'t need to make it smooth at all.
Loose battery pack?
The battery pack should be installed very comfortably.
Nevertheless, you may find that it can be moved slightly inside the handle.
This will move the reed switch, making it harder for you to know where the magnet needs to open the lightsaber.
To prevent the battery pack and reed switch from sliding down the handle, you can fill the space at the bottom of the handle with a few pieces of torn and crumpled stuff --up paper.
After doing this, place the PVC end cap at the bottom to close the handle. Warning!
The next step is a bit cumbersome--
Be patient and you can make it work!
How it works, we have now put our lightsaber circuit safely and comfortably in the body.
We have a sliding magnet.
We can rotate and slide the holder of the handle up and down.
Put the magnet into the bracket the next step is to insert the magnet into the hole of the magnet-
Holder and find a good place to live for it.
Due to the size of the magnet and the very small irregularities of the holes we drill, sometimes your magnet will cling perfectly to the holes of the magnet holder.
Sometimes it wants to quit.
If it wants to fall off, you can fix it in place with a small piece of tape.
Once the magnet is in the holder, you will want to slide slowly and rotate the magnet holder up and down the handle.
You will find a bunch of open and closed places.
You\'ll want to find where it is, but turn off as you rotate or move up and down a small amount.
The magnet holder should be placed on the handle.
The next step is completely optional, but we found it a simple and beautiful way to limit the motion area of the slider.
Now that the lightsaber has been turned on, it can be turned off with a very small action, find the \"off\" place, slide the magnet holder up or down slightly to the handle so that the light is turned off.
Wrap the handle with a little electronic tape so that the slider cannot move in that direction.
If you slide the slider up the handle to close the blade, wrap it from the top of the slider to the collar around the blade.
If you slide the slider down the handle, wrap it from the bottom of the slider to the end cap.
Find the \"on\" point and now slide the slider back so that the blade opens again.
Wrap another part of the handle with tape.
You should have a small area surrounded with black tape and the magnet holder can slide up and down to easily close and open the lightsaber.
You should be able to close and open the lightsaber by slightly twisting the handle. Awesome!
You\'re done!
There is also an optional step that we think looks good.
The blade of your lightsaber is a transparent polycarbonate tube.
Inside the tube, you can see the inner tube and the LED chain, and it is clear that the blade consists of many discrete LED. Why?
To cover this up and make the blade look more like a continuous ray of light, you can polish it on the outside of the polycarbonate tube.
By polishing the tube, you create many tiny scratches and wear that reflect the light in many different directions when the light reaches the edge.
This makes the tube translucent, not transparent, and more evenly spreads light from LEDs.
View photos for comparison.
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