Welcome, we are the lightsaber team of the Fall 2021 Principles of Integrated Engineering Class. For our final project, we decided to create our very own lightsabers! You can find more about our engineering or design via these links, or read on below to learn more about the overall goals we had and what we did!
For our project, we planned to build two replica lightsabers. On the mechanical side, we want to make a separable hilt and blade which can be disconnected and reconnected easily. The hilt itself needs to be at least large enough to hold our electronics, including a speaker, controller, and enough batteries to power the saber. The blade was expected to be sturdy enough to be swung around as if dueling. For our second blade, we wanted to make an extendable blade controlled by a button on the hilt. Other lesser goals included making a modular hilt, making the lightsaber properly balanced, and possibly adding a kyber crystal reveal in the hilt.
On the electrical/software side we wanted both lightsabers to possess visual and sound effects, as well as power on and off in a similar way to Disney’s lightsabers. For effects, we wanted to have multiple characters available to the user via a button which would change the lightsaber’s color and play a theme song. In idle, the lightsaber also emulates hits and swinging noises via the speaker.
For this project we hope that we are able to get as close to a traditional replica saber as possible. Our main inspiration coming from the Disney Imagineers most recent lightsaber.
In the end, we were able to deliver on our project goals and create both lightsabers. Some improvements we would like to make in future iterations include:
Demos of both lightsabers can be found below:
Abby is an electrical and computer engineer (although that might switch computing) form the class of 2024. Her love of Star Wars started at a young age and is thrilled to have been part of making a replica lightsaber.
Jacob is a design engineer from the class of 2024. He likes to make things work and make them look nice. Engineering things from movies, TV shows and video games is his favorite pastime. Never tell him the odds.
Laurel is a (mostly) mechanical engineer in the Class of 2023. She made it all the way to last year having only seen Episodes 4, 7, 8, and 9, but has since been educated with the rest of Star Wars’ cinematic history. She’s slowly coming to terms with the fact that sometimes, in engineering, the garbage will do.
Nabih is an Electrical and Computer Engineer of the Class of 2023. He has been obsessed with Star Wars since before he can remember and somehow convinced his teammates to make a lightsaber. He learned how to CAD just for this, the Force helped a little.
Oscar is a Computing Engineer of the Class of 2023. He has always loved Star Wars since he was a kid and played with his own toy lightsabers growing up. Getting to work on replica lightsabers of our own has been a blast!