I recently picked up one of the officially licensed ZhongDong Toys Lightsabers for about 30 USD, the Yoda variant. I got it because the smooth ignition/retraction caught my eye and the fact that there were 4 SKUs with different blade colors - my theory was that they were just using the same RGB LED strip in the blade to cut costs. And lo and behold, a month later I got my hands on it and it is indeed a 150 (75 on each side) LED RGB strip in a (thick!) polycarbonate blade.
That, combined with the fact that it includes a rechargeable battery (with integrated killswitch) means that it’s practically a drop in conversion, with one big caveat -
The plastic hilt is solvent welded together, which means getting into it can be a pain. I ended up using some acetone on the inside, and cutting along the seams with a craft knife until it finally separated (with some… newfound weathering).
After that, it was a pretty simple task of designing a few 3D printed parts to allow for easier mounting of the proffieboard and securing of the hilt back together. The speaker is surprisingly loud and decently clear (a bit tinny, but it’s a toy).
I’d recommend using a battery protection circuit because I’m sure the cell included isn’t meaningfully protected (and there’s plenty of space inside the hilt for one) but for my build I’ve just elected to remove the battery when not in use.
Since the hilt was glued together, there’s no meaningful way to secure the bottom of the hilt back together (the top of the hilt has two screws that secure the blade, so it’s not an issue there). To mitigate having to glue it back together and not being able to access the board, I designed a small ring that slides over the bottom of the hilt to clamp it shut.
It’s certainly not up to the standard of a hobby-grade dueling lightsaber, and the hilt feels really flimsy and light in the hand, but it’s a fun little project that does net you a fully-functional pixel-blade proffie lightsaber on the cheap!
Yeah, you can barely get just a blade for that price, let alone one with LEDs in it! It looks like the blade is a standard 1 inch diameter and about the same length as my 82cm blades, so it should be compatible out of the box with standard hilts.
The fact that the only downside to the build is that the hilt is glued means that if you don’t care about the hilt, and just want the blade, there’s no downside!
One thing to note is that the blade’s color accuracy, at least compared to my other sabers, is somewhat lacking. A lot of the yellow blades I have are more greenish, and the oranges are a little yellow. I’m sure you can correct for that by changing the colors in the bladestyle, but if you have a standard library of styles you use across your sabers, your colors are gonna look a little off.
It’s also obviously not as bright, but I’m pretty sure that’s just due to the rather sparse density of the LED strip.
I have a Windu on order with plans to tear it down as well. I know the insides vary a little bit at least, since the Luke hilt has the USB port on the control box. I’m curious to see just how much they vary.
Yeah, that’s the KSith x Kyberphonic x Blue Mamba Surivivor II bundle with a heavily modified Fett Survivor bladestyle. It’s actually the crossguard variant, because my primary saber right now is a crossguard saber and I just copied the SD card over to this one
If you check the Printables link in the first message, it has a link to exactly which breakout board I used in my design. I don’t have a Vader on-hand, so I don’t know if the parts I’ve designed are compatible, though. I guess we’ll see soon enough!
The Windu has arrived! It seemed to have less glue (I was able to just pull it apart gently with my hands) which leads me to believe that the glue application may be uneven between batches, so it’s probably a lottery as to how easy it is to get into these things. The hilt also seems a bit sturdier, almost no creaking when swung. The internals seem to be identical but in a different location, so I’m gonna have to rearrange my ProffieBoard mount to fit this one.
The battery and speaker are bundled together into a quaint removable battery pack, with an integrated killswitch. It looks like a standard unprotected 18650 cell, and the speaker claims to be 5 watts. It is interchangeable between the sabers, it seems.
(It might be hidden behind the three dots menu).
