It’s gonna be real hard not to cram a bunch more LEDS and a proper battery in that thing. I’ve only gotta wait like 26 more days. Thanks for sharing!
I honestly think that the LEDs it came with are just fine, as long as you aren’t doing any direct comparisons with enthusiast blades. The battery could probably stand being upgraded to a protected cell, but honestly it doesn’t die very quickly in my experience, so I see no reason to swap it out. The only thing I would say could really use an upgrade is the hilt, since it’s so light compared to the blade (I might hot glue some weights into the hilt to make it a little more balanced).
And we’ve got lights! Was a pretty simple adaptation to my original PB mount, and theoretically this one should also work in the Yoda body as well. I don’t think I even need the bottom ring to hold this hilt together like the Yoda hilt, since the battery cap on this one has a small lip that catches and holds the body closed.
This one feels a lot better in the hand and doesn’t feel as cheap/creaky. The only problem is that the button is really easy to accidentally press 
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Oh, and here’s a stripped down config for these converted sabers, using Fett’s prop. It includes blade styles for all 5 saber variants.
ZD Toys.h (57.7 KB)
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It’s so awesome. Kudos to you for recognizing that smooth ignition and figuring out there were RGB LEDs in there.
You might try pine box Derby weights from the hobby store to balance out Yoda better. They come in little cylinders that you can cut to size for some of that dead inside space. I’ll try it when mine gets here!
Well that was quick! You got up and running almost right away. One of the images you showed has a dark portion of the blade in the center… is that just style and when you took the image or an issue with the strip?
That’s the Crispity bladestyle! I wanted a style with multiple colors to show that it was, in fact, an RGB strip 
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I purchased a second Windu to keep without converting, and while messing around with it I noticed something interesting-
This is the sound from the stock Windu saber:
And this is KSith’s Mace played on the converted one:
The stock hum sound on the Windu saber appears to be a poorly cut and looped hum from the KSith font…
Wouldn’t surprise me. I did some byte for byte comparisons of the sounds that come with some of the Aliexpress boards/sabers and found some kyberphonic and ksith files inside other fonts. Some “reuse” going on for sure…
Not super surprising for cheap mass-produced china Lightsabers, but I guess I assumed them being licensed might have gotten them some official sounds from lucasfilm/disney or something.
so you’re gonna put proffie in these?
That’s the plan. Following the info above from @Crazy plus whatever surprises I find in the Vader. So far not entirely sure how to split it apart. The blade looks good though.
Nice! And yeah, getting them apart is definitely a puzzle. I scarred my Yoda up a little bit trying to do so. I ended up just pulling them apart with my hands after loosening it up a little bit using some acetone and a q-tip along the inside seams. A craft knife helped me get started, and I used an old, broken chisel to pry it apart at the emitter.
Yeah, I finally got it apart but not without a little damage. I think I could do it cleaner the next go. But This is a decent blade for sure. 3mm thick so the heavy duty type with a PCB style pixel stick.
Here’s the insides. Looks similar. I was considering modifying the bubble strip to light up. Will likely take a resin printed part to do it and some additional modification to this control box. Fun project for sure!
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Hah, looks like they misdrilled the holes in the blade the first time, that’s pretty funny. That Vader is a surprising amount of parts, with the emitter shroud, button panel, and control box both being separate pieces. All the ones I’ve got look to just be two clamshell pieces. An illuminated control box would be sick, and it’s pretty neat that the design definitely allows you to accommodate that pretty easily. Also, it seems to be black plastic that’s been painted silver (which I guess finally answers the mystery of why there’s a huge black stripe under the clamp band), instead of the ones that I have which are kinda beige plastic painted both black and silver (and gold for windu)…
that layout looks like it might be compatible with my existing Yoda PB mount, I’d be curious if it fits in without modification…
I was going to print and give it a try to see. I was looking at options for where I might gain access to the SD externally. I’ll start with what you already designed to see how the fit is and let you know.
I was considering external SD access somehow, but I couldn’t really figure out a way without cutting a big ol hole in the shell for the USB port as well… I figured that SD over Serial would probably be the easiest thing to do in this situation. Maybe you could design a removable control box that reveals the SD card reader or something?