Rave Saber is an open source, open hardware lightsaber build. Unlike most sabers, which focus on mainly on sound playback - we focus heavily on the visual effects. Rave sabers are meant to be swung around to the beat of some loud music :)
Rave Saber uses DotStar LEDs driven with an Atmel ATmega168a AVR microcontroller.
The Hardware & Firmware releases are kept in lockstep - v1 of the firmware should be used with v1 of the hardware.
This version migrates us from a prototyping board to an actual PCB. We've refined the circuit, switched the majority of components from through-hole to SMD, and bumped the oscillator crystal up to 20Mhz.
There were no significant firmware changes, the primary change was modifying the code to run at 20Mhz instead of 16Mhz.
This is the first semi-portable design. Instead of a breadboard & bench power supply, the components are soldered onto a prototyping board & a voltage regulator has been added for use with 7.4V Li-Ion betteries. We've also added an external oscillator circuit that lets us bump the chip speed from 8Mhz to 16Mhz. There is still no recommended blade or hilt design - we zip-tied our LEDs, board, & battery to a 1x2 piece of wood.
The firmware now supports rendering patterns in addition to solid colors. There are pre-defined patterns for flashes, ribbons, bands & scrolls in both RGB & Rainbow color sequences. If you don't like the patterns pre-defined in our library, you can write your own as well. Some power-saving optimizations have been made now that we are limited by battery life, for example, we can limit the current used by the strip so that all 144 LEDs can be lit without exceeding the 3A supplied by the power circuit.
This is pretty much the simplest possible design we could make. It's meant for prototyping & testing - not for use in a hilt. The hardware is assembled using a breadboard & powered via a bench power supply, and the firmware allows for switching between various blade colors.
These licenses apply to every Rave Saber repository:
- Code: GPL v3.0
- Hardware: CERN OHL v1.2
- Content/Media: CC BY-NC-SA v4.0
Feel free to contact us for exceptions.