Lightsaber in 2 days

This project was a spontaneous idea that came from our (Neil Janwani, Ashwin Saxena) desire to build one last project before we all left for college. However, it was extremely last minute; I was to leave for Purdue in 2 days.

This left us with limited options in the parts to use. The reason why we chose to build a lightsaber was that we had a spare Teensy 3.2 + prop shield, which houses an accelerometer, amplifier, and LED driver, all the necessary components for a lightsaber.

A few hours into the project, however, I shorted two pins while soldering and fried the Teensy board. Since Amazon Prime takes at least 2 days, we were left with no other option than to make it work with an Arduino Nano, which has no accelerometer, LED driver, or amplifier. Fortunately, the WS2812B LED strips used in the music reactive lights project had a built-in LED driver.

The amplifier problem was also somewhat resolved by using a 2N2222 NPN transistor as a tiny amplifier to drive the 1” speakers. Although it worked perfectly to play sounds, it proved to be useless since the Arduino Nano is not powerful enough to process the LED code and the sound, which would be run simultaneously as the lightsaber was activated/deactivated.

Nonetheless, we had a working lightsaber that we could swing around, in 2 days!