minifig404Welcome. For those from /r/lightsabers, thanks for stopping by. For those from Hackaday (or elsewhere) unfamiliar with lightsabers, that subreddit has a very helpful Buyer's Guide that will give you the high-level of the ecosystem.
There are many lightsabers that bill themselves as "combat-ready". That's not new. Nor is the variety of blades, colors, sounds, or sound effects. There's even sabers with customizable motion control now. However, the only sabers that can be used confidently in a combat scenario (as far as I've seen) are the ones that are ruthlessly simple in their function. The instant you add more complex functions, you have to really think about how you do it, or else they show their weaknesses under fire, and lose their fun. But even those simple sabers still find a way to break down in really hard to fix ways. This leaves the market, to my eyes, composed entirely of half-measures and compromises.
Here's the thing: all of these issues are fixable.
Clunky button menus do not have to be the standard. Motion controls with a mind of their own changing your settings behind your back don't have to exist. Slow-scrolling color fading doesn't have to drag you down. Random button-triggered visual effects that can give people seizures don't have to make you afraid to turn the saber on. Broken wires don't have to leave you doing "percussive maintenance" in the middle of a combat round
I'm looking to tackle as many of these problems as I can. I want to make a saber that fits you perfectly. It does everything you need it to do, nothing you don't want, and you always know how it's going to act without having to think about it.
How do I aim to do this? By attacking all of the problems everywhere, all the way up and down the stack. No sacrifices, no shortcuts.
- Eliminating button menus and motion controls means you can't input anything on the saber itself. So, we'll have to add some other input system. A phone app is by far the easiest-to-explain way of adding flexible user input over settings. We'll keep the on/off button, and probably allow the user to assign extra functions to it if they so desire. You don't have to have those extra functions if you don't want them.
- Include some modularity to allow hardware customization, but use headers to make everything easily replaced.
- Need to fit a very particular LED module? We can probably make a board for that.
- Want more than one button? That's easy enough, here's a board and a file to edit.
- RGB Blade? Sure thing. Non-RGB Blade? There's a mode for that too.
- Frayed wire? No sweat. Extra wires were in the box, and by using connectors, they're an easy swap.
Between these changes, we should be able to make a significantly better lightsaber. It's not going to be easy, but I'd like to believe the end result is worth it.