DIY Tiny Lightsaber

I've been wanting to make a DIY cheap lightsaber for ages now. However, i didn't come around to find the correct materials. A few weeks ago i found every item that i might need and got to work!

The total cost of this tiny lightsaber was around 2$, i had all the items laying around the house already. If you were to buy this all you could spend like 10$ and built at lest 5 of these.

It took me about 2 weeks to complete this, mainly due to trial and error.. allot of errors.. Mainy errors to be honest!

I'll be entering this into the make it glow contest! Please drop me a vote if you like this project!

I'll also be entering this into the Epilog contest! Lasercutter? Hell yeah! I've had a bit of experience with lasercutting and absolutely adore it. I'm currently looking into gaining more experience toward the technical side of it.

There's a pretty high step for getting into lasercutting. As an interaction designer i'm always looking for simpler and easier way to get into something. If i have controlled access to a laser cutter I would be able to do research on the whole process and eventually come up with some software upgrades or UI / UX improvements which will suit us all.

Oh and who doesn't like lasers?!

-Glass Tube (tube use to carry a vanilla stick, i bought it at my local grocery store (Colruyt in Belgium) and it was there perfect size!)

- Tack switches ( I used 12mmx12mmx6mm)

- PVC conduit tube (16mm outer diameter, 13mm inner diameter)

- PVC flexible conduit tube (16mm outer diameter, 10mm inner diameter)

- 3 Green LED's

- 1 Red LED (i used it as a switch)

- 3 LR44 battery cells (They carry 1,4V each, x3 = 4,2V) (Don't worry about the LED's they're 3,3V but will handle 4V without any problem as long as you don't run in for hours at a time)

- Cheap springs i salvaged

TOOLS:

- Soldering iron

- Hot Glue

- PVC glue

- Super Glue

- Spraypaint

Cut a pice of conduit to the shape you want. I decided to go for the classic look.

As you can see, the glass tube fit's smoothly into the part we just made!

I used a piece of flexible conduit to add some detail into the mix, you can leave this out if you can't find any.

The bottom part is a simple tube. The overall length of the PVC part is just as long as the glass tube (this will look nice later.)

Take 3 LED's, Twist the positive prongs together and solder them to a red wire, do the same for the negative prongs but solder them to a black wire.

Then solder the red wire to a click switch.

Use a multimeter to check how the path flows, in my case i could wire it diagonal.

Extend the diagonal opposing prong from the click switch with another red wire.

Solder a spring to the end of this wire.

Leave the black wire as is for now!

Use either a drill or a hot soldering iron to make a whole which snugly fits a LED. This will become our button later.

Feed the black wire through the tube so it sticks out at the end.

Use a liberate amount of hot glue to fit the tack switch in place, make sure it aligns properly with the hole we just made.

Leave the red cable with the spring lose in the tube, this will give us some flexibility later.

Use the soldering iron once again to make a small hole in the cap from the glass tube. Just big enough for the wire to pass through.

Feed the wire through and solder it to another spring.

Use a liberate amount of hot glue to glue the spring and cable into the cap. (This will be our negative pole later)

we can now hook up our battery to test if this all works!

Hooray!

Now that the electronics are working we can stack it all together, i used a combination of hot glue to fill in the voids and super glue to stick it together quickly. PVC glue should work but in my cas it didn't have enough surface to glue to.

Still Working! Double hooray!

Disaster strikes you when you least expect it.

While making the final fit this thing exploded in my hand covering everything with glass. The hot glue i used to keep it in place also ate a bunch of glass shards.

note: My work is pretty clean, my workplace isn't while i'm working on something.

No Hooray this time.

Luckily the store and so many glass tubes that they had to sell them!

Use a propper PVC primer de prepare your surface to get painted!

Use light coats to get your desired paint job.

This was a struggle but i love the outcome!

I ended up throwing my first try away after the paint job came out terrible.

The Second built took me about 30 minutes (paint not included)

Drop me a line below if you have some feedback or send me a picture if you decided to make your own!

Thanks for reading!