3D printed hilt with electronics

[Lazarus215]

So I 3D printed a saber hilt and stuffed a bunch of electronics and a crazy bright LED star in it, and heres the result! I'll probably add some gold inlays (much like LE versions).









Here's what I used...
1x Cree Tri-XP-E2 (Blue, Royal Blue, White dies in series)
1x heatsink and housing module for 1" OD blades
1x 12mm AV momentary blue illuminated switch
1x DynaOhm 20mA resistot
1x Buckpuck
1x Pololu Momentary to latching converter board
3x 14500 800mAh Li-Ion cells
1x 3D printer
Alotx Patience

between waiting for parts, assembly, reassembly, re-re-assembly, re-printing, and rewiring everything, this took me about 3 weeks to do. (Most time spent waiting for parts, especially because one order got messed up)

I really enjoyed doing this project! I made this mainly to get familiar with the electronics aspect of sabers, and to make a toy for my daughters.

All the "oooo shiny!" aside, this build does have its issues...

There isn't a whole lot of room in the hilt for the buckpuck, switch, board, and 3 Li-Ion cells... everything is pretty well (delicately) crammed in there... that and the LED star puts out a TON of heat.... enough to melt the glue on the inside of a UE heavy blade at the base after about 10 mins of on-time... any more and it would probably start to melt the plastic of the hilt. The model also didn't accommodate for all of the holes required... Mainly for blade retention, LED module retention, screws for the hand guards, and the switch... so I had to drill all of those out. The original model was also all pressure-fit in place. I had modified it so the entire body was secured by threads. (that was fun...) In the future, I may make the same hilt in aluminum with a less-intense LED star (to avoid melting blades)

Hope you all enjoy this!

[B1ondeange1]

I love the design! That calls out to me very much

[OlynKhorn]

That sucker is awesome!! Do you have your own printer?


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[Lazarus215]

Thank you B1ondeAnge1! It's a design from MyMiniFactory.com by the name Modern Lightsaber. I had to do a fair bit of remodelling for it though...

OlynKhorn, I do have my own printer. I've currently got a standard cartesian i3 type, but I'm working on building my own SLA printer (makes much smoother, smaller, and more detailed prints. MUCH more expensive...)

[B1ondeange1]

A 3D printer will definitely be on our future list given the amount of costuming abd prop making we do. Hubby won't justify the expense until he's learnt how to do some of the modelling himself though (and he wants to wait til they come down in price a bit more, he doesn't want a real cheapy)

[Jediseth]

What's it made out of? There's a guy on another forum who is making sabers with 3-d printing. It's freaking awesome. I have no idea how you do that stuff? And how do you go from printed 3-d paper to metal like aluminum? Or brass?
I love that you did that. Nice job! You have accomplished something I have been trying to wrap my brain around for a couple months now.

Here is the link to the saber I'm talking about.


https://vimeo.com/166441668

[Lazarus215]

So the hilt is made out of PLA plastic. There's a couple of different filaments available including some with brass and metal in the filament makeup, so you can polish it up and make it look like actual metal or brass, but I don't believe it can take the same temperatures and stress as actual metal. As far as transferring the design from plastic to aluminum/brass, I just take the same model in my slicing program (I use a software called Simplify3D) and instead of using it for an additive creation (where material is added to make the model), you make a destructive or subtractive creation (removing material to make the model, for example, any kind of machining). From there, the program makes the list of what's called G-code (commands that make the tool head move) and you can either copy and paste said code into the CNC machine, or run the code straight from your computer (if it's connected to the machine). Then the machine takes care of the rest! It's actually a pretty simple process once you've actually done it.

B1onde, There are some self-assembly kits for 3D printers out there that are pretty dang cheap. I did a DIY kit and it cost me in total about $350 USD for all the parts. You just need some basic knowledge of electronics and some more advanced knowledge of coding in C++ to make everything work. There is firmware out there that will basically generate itself when you put in all the info (I use Repetier Firmware, it has a "wizard" to generate the code) After that, it's all just calibration and tweaking. It's not necessarily easy, but you can get the hang of it pretty quick. I had my brother who is a software engineer help me out with mine, so I cheated

[scifidude79]

That's really cool, great work.  I really like your design and it looks well executed.  This is an idea I've been thinking of, it's nice to see someone actually do it.  Since you had to re-order parts and re-re-assemble, I'm guessing it didn't go quite as planned.  But then, nothing ever does in saber building.    I'm just stoked to see this actually done and that the results are so fantastic.  It's encouraging.

[Lazarus215]

My main issue was just the space inside the hilt and using 3 Li-Ion cells... it takes up a lot of room.  figuring out the battery layout, buckpuck position, and everything else with the switch in the hilt made for an interesting game of lightsaber tetris. the re-ordering of parts was a design issue I was making. I originally set up the LED so that each die was run in parallel, so each die needed a pretty beefy resistor (4.7w 5 ohm) and that was going to make a ton of heat on top of the already hot star. so I scrapped that, ran them in series, and needed a buckpuck then. Then I had a store ship me a wrong item (they sent me 15 5mm UV LEDs instead of 3 DynaOhms)  so I had to wait another week for them to actually come. then it was just figuring out how I was going to position the cells in the hilt. I ended up just stacking them all ontop of eachother in a stack and stuffed that thing as deep into the hilt as I could. (thankfully, the pommel is pretty dang long too!)

[scifidude79]

Dang, 3 Li-Ion cells?  That's a lot of power.  I can see why you had space issues.  Even 3 14500 cells will take up a lot of room.

[Lazarus215]

Yeah, 3 Li-ions...

The blue die takes 3.47v at 1000mA
The Royal blue die takes 3.41v at 1000mA
and the white die takes 3.15v at 1000mA
= 10.03v = needs 3 cells at 3.7v each

Probably not going to do one of those again... though it is an amazing day-saber.

[MavRick]

I must say , this looks pretty cool!  Point to you.

[Hansrad]

That's an awesome design. Love the style and the different textures. Plus angled emitters alway look cool. Great work!

[Lazarus215]

So I was tweaking my setup (switching from 3 LEDs in series to 2, thus dropping one Li-Ion cell), and I ended up breaking a wire at the base of my Buckpuck.... So with that on it's way now, I decided to go back over the design for this whole thing. I did aligned everything in AutoCAD and I'm going to be doing some measuring and putting holes in the model for retention screws and the switch (instead of needed to hand-drill them). That and the paint I have didnt really last too long and keep it's super shiny coat so I started looking into filaments with metal flakes in them so they can be polished on a wheel. I've got a bench grinder already so the most expensive part is out of the way. The cloth wheels and compound is only going to run me about $15 and the filament $45 or so with the abrasive resistant nozzle.

Hopefully this filament really polishes up nice as I could do a couple of hilts in it. As always, I'll be throwing up in-progress pics in here for you to enjoy my failures adventures.

I'm also starting to venture into the reals of chemical etching, so wish me luck with that!

[Lazarus215]

short update:

Buckpucks are in (I ordered multiple for future projects), wiring harness is all redone, everything is resoldered and functioning... The blade still looks really bright, but evberything is staying disassembled until I print the aluminum/PLA hilt. (That wont be getting ordered until next month due to finances.) So now I play the waiting game for the rest of the week...

I did have some questions for anyone who may do chemical etching and may be reading this... Does anyone know if a Cupric Sulfate Pentahydrate/Sodium Chloride mix will etch Brass the way it does Aluminum? I've got a really interesting idea (thank to my wife) and I'm going to try and make a full brass hilt. It should be interesting to say the least.