Lightsaber prop

This repository contains the code, Arduino libraries, schematics, and PCB files for a lightsaber prop. The goal of this project is to make a kit for a maker club I am part of. The plan for the project includes LED light strips for the "blade", an accelerometer, and sound effects that respond to motion.

Technical overview

The main code of the lightsaber runs on an Arduino Nano, which interfaces with the accelerometer and can directly control the LED lights in the blade. However, the Nano is not directly responsible for generating the audio. Instead, the Nano sends commands to an ATtiny85, which generates the audio accordingly. The ATtiny can read sound effects from a flash chip and write the audio data to a DAC.

The ATtiny also has the characteristic buzzing sound of a lightsaber stored in its program memory. When the accelerometer senses rotation, the Nano can command the ATtiny to change the amplitude of the buzzing accordingly.

More details about this project can be found on Hackaday and in my blog post.

Parts of this repository

This repository consists of four main parts:

1. The code for the ATtiny in lightsaber_tiny.c. Before uploading this code to the ATtiny, the correct clock source must be selected by programming the low fuse byte (run avrdude with -U lfuse:w:0xe1:m). This ensures that the ATtiny is clocked at 16MHz.
2. The schematic and PCB files in the board directory. These files can be opened with gschem and gEDA PCB respectively.
3. The Arduino library in the libraries directory. The library can be installed by copying the lightsaber subdirectory into the libraries directory in your sketchbook folder. See the Arduino documentation fore more information on this process.
4. The Arduino code for the Nano in the arduino_lightsaber directory. This can be opened directly with the Arduino IDE.

The file lightsaber_nano.c is a test file that can also be uploaded to the Arduino Nano. This program varies the amplitude of the buzzing sound as the accelerometer is rotated and can be used to test the audio samples stored in the flash chip.