Hey everybody, I have an LGT lightsaber that I’m wanting to upgrade the electronics inside. I want to switch it to a 2 button setup with a fully enclosed speaker and a Bluetooth module while still keeping a removable chassis and/or battery. I don’t really know all that much about 3d printing or chassis design. Any suggestions on anything from tutorials, products, or contacts for someone to design it for me? Thanks!
Do you have a 3d printer?
I don’t, but a friend of mine does
And are you interested in learning all this stuff, or do you just want it done?
Learning about 3d printing can be a lot of fun, but’s going to take a while, and your first attempt(s) are probably not going to be great.
You would need to:
- Find a cad program you like
- measure the existing chasis (or the inside of the saber)
- Make the design (make sure to leave lots of space for wires.)
- Get your friend to help you
If you know any programming, openscad might be a reasonable cad program for you.
(If not, you might want to ask someone else to use, as I use openscad myself.)
You’ll need a pair of digital calipers to measure stuff, then it’s just a matter of ideas and patience to actually create the design. I’m sure there are some designs on thingyverse you can use as inspiration.
As far as design programs go, I’d also recommend Blender. For one, it’s completely free, and also plenty powerful enough to do all you’d need for chassis design. It’s admittedly a bit intimidating to look at at first, but once you get the basics of it down, it’s pretty easy to figure the rest out and do all you need to do.
There’s a fantastic set of video tutorials for it by CG Cookie too. Here’s the playlist for their basic course. It looks like a lot, but they’re all pretty concise videos, and you’re probably not going to need to watch all of them. I myself only had to watch the first 10 before I was able to figure out the rest just by playing around.
Thank you both for your input. I’ll definitely check both of those out. I’m a bit of a programmer (I’ve been building PowerShell apps for years and I’ve been working my way through a coding bootcamp), so I’m liking the look of openscad so far, but I’ll at least take a look at those tutorial videos to see if I might like blender better.
Based on how things go, I might lean a bit more towards just wanting to get it done this time around since I already work a full time job, I’m going through this bootcamp and applying to jobs, and this will be my first build, so I’ll be trying to learn that as it is already… But then again, I might end up really enjoying the process of learning 3D design 
We’ll see. Thanks again for your input