Imagine making a pixel strip that only uses side-firing pixels and all the side-firing pixels are on the same side. I wonder how many of these you could potentially cram into a blade? Each pixel strip would become a “wedge” inside the blade, and imagine you could have quite a few wedges.
Now imagine that it was a zig-zag blade…
it’d be a particularly rigid blade, if nothing else.
There’s probably a few ways to make it feasible.
Cool. Lots more places for LEDs to stand out individually, not up/down, font/back, or even boxed out as a quad. Getting close to outward facing rings where effects could swirl around in side the blade.
The marble blade!
Yeah how about just a bunch of stacked PCB rings with side firing LEDs?
Probably heavy as hell, super hot, and require a whole bunch of power… but BRIGHT.
My ideas for cramming 100W of LED power into a single blade all failed on the drawing board because of heat dissipation issues. The only thermally viable solution was liquid cooling, and I had a prototype with a short vertical stack of 3W LEDs mounted with 1 inch spacing on small aluminum bases with a convex parabolic bottom, to reflect the upward portion of the light to the sides and effectively double the amount of point lights by creating a virtual image of each LED chip. For continuous operation it would have needed a circulation pump and either a heat sink or a large(ish) tank somewhere on the hilt side.
I did try using fluorescent cooling liquid, a water-ethanol mix with a small amount of Rhodamine-IV dye, and that gave me a pretty good diffusion almost without attenuation. Rhodamine is best excited by green and fluoresces yellow, so it would have been a yellow-only saber.
(Rhodamine-IV sounds rather like a SW planet, doesn’t it?)
However, the coolant was conductive, and I failed to seal all the wiring inside. The result was a low voltage electrolysis that made the rhodamine decompose and lose its fluorescence. It also made the solution look like dirty dishwater.
Seeing how even my 20 cm prototype pulled more than 5A at 4V, I never scaled it up to a full length blade. It was pretty bright, though, and not extremely heavy either despite the liquid-filled interior.
I should have posted more experiments here, but seeing how it basically failed I didn’t bother. I know that negative results need to be published so that others can improve on the failed designs, but it’s no fun to do it. Unless the failures are spectacular or even explosive, but these were just “meh”.
I dunno I thought that was fascinating. Cool experiment.
Would the zig-zag wedge blade have framerate issues? Depending on the pcb width and thickness, and led’s per meter, the blade could easily have from 1200 to 2500 leds–or would you cluster them instead of them being all independent?
I was working on an independent six-strip blade using the 5mm 200 led/m strips for a total of 920 pixels in series–but shelved the project when I re-read about frame-rate issues with strips that long. I considered doing 3 sets of 2 parallel strips, but for now, I’m sticking with 4 independent strips of 200/m. They’re not as bright as I’d like, but the diffusion is excellent.
If it’s all one string, then yes.
2500 leds would have a maxium frame rate of 800kHz/24/2500 = 13.3 Hz
Even if you split them up into multiple strings, currently ProffieOS will only feed out data on one string at a time. (Except on Teensy4). And even if you could solve the data transfer problem, an 80Mhz Proffieboard would struggle to run the styles for all 2500 leds quickly enough.