Just a few months after graduating college, Jason Uy and his fellow engineers built a lightsaber. Now, plenty of companies will build you a custom saber, “whoosh” sound effects and all. Not to mention, Disney itself sells its own Galaxy’s Edge blades for a premium. But Uy and his team’s DIY lightsaber can extend and retract with just the push of a button. Plus, it glows with voluminous light that a force-sensitive kyber crystal-power laser sword should. It’s the lightsaber every Star Wars fan has always wanted.
Uy’s blade is akin to one Disney built for itself but held off sharing with the public except for display at its now-defunct Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser. On his YouTube channel HeroTech, Uy swung his blade around without it falling apart. Disney’s engineers reportedly struggled with that, hence why the company probably hasn’t tried to sell an extending blade to ravenous Star Wars fans.
Uy developed the concept while he was still studying at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. His first rendition took a similar tack to Disney’s Star Wars laser blade, with the first prototype using a motorized tape measure attached to an LED strip. That early lightsaber was “just a box,” Uy said. To develop it further, he recruited two other students from his school, Maddie Tong and Aaron Codrington, to develop the extending lightsaber into something you could grip with one hand.
What’s especially interesting about the HeroTech saber is what it’s using to create the extension. Uy’s team settled on a magician’s cane, which simply unwinds and collapses but maintains its rigidity. An LED strip supplies the glow and controls the rate of extension. It creates a “darksaber” effect from certain angles rather than the circular blade typical of the Star Wars movies. The YouTuber told Gizmodo he had plans to fix that issue simply by rotating the entire internal mechanism fast enough so you couldn’t see the sides.
Gizmodo spoke to Uy at length about his project and future plans. This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
Gizmodo: Let me guess. Have you been into Star Wars for a while? What made you want to make your own, and that’s not the usual polycarbonate style?
Jacob Uy: Oh yeah, I’m a huge fan. Ever since I was a kid. I’ve always loved lightsabers. I have a lot of respect for the people who are making these things because it’s a lot of work, a lot of engineering, and a lot of testing. I always felt it was a little odd that for the nice lightsabers, you had to stick the end of the blade on. Because, in my head, that’s not the lightsaber experience. I have respect for anybody who makes lightsabers because it’s hugely difficult. It’s expensive and hard.
Gizmodo: I’d like to hear how you guys started doing this project and how you developed it from its first conception.
Jacob Uy: So I actually started doing this as a class project. Basically, for our final, we had a group project, and I was with one of my friends. We both love Star Wars, and so we had the freedom to do whatever project we wanted to do. We asked, ‘Why don’t we build a lightsaber?’ For that final project, we were able to make an extending and retracting blade, but it was huge. It was basically a box that used a motorized tape measure with an LED strip stuck onto it. I wanted to develop further. I got two people from my university, Maddie [Tong] and Aaron [Codrington], who stayed with me through the entire project.
Giz: How did you go a different route than Disney when designing your lightsaber?
Uy: Disney is doing something interesting. I think they developed their own tape measure blades, in a sense, and their own plastic to get the light diffusion just right. During our testing, our limitation was that we weren’t going to make a custom plastic just for this. When we were testing the version with a tape measure, we found that you can’t swing it around. It would just break and flop all over, which I think might be a limitation Disney’s running into as well.
Giz: So, what was your solution?
Uy: We tested a bunch of different extension stuff. We did the electric car antennas. There’s these RC car winches as well. Then we looked at whether we could attach that to—something that could telescope, like the telescoping you see in toy lightsabers. There’s a toy version from a really long time ago that’s spring loaded, but then you still can’t retract it. Eventually, we found the magician’s cane, and we realized it could be the solution because it’s so small, it can fit inside a hilt, and it extends really long and really quickly. I think it’s different from any other design that’s out there.
Giz: And then you went for LED strips, right? I don’t know if it’s like that based on the video, but it seems like it really had an expansive glow.
Uy: We wanted to use LED strips for sure. Because you can use base-lit, you can use lasers, but there’s nothing visually that is really comparable to a high-powered LED strip. This is when the relatively new technology of chip-on-board LED strips had just come out. It’s actually so bright you can’t look directly at it. It is probably the closest thing I’ve I’ve ever seen to like a real lightsaber blade. I’ve had a bunch of Neopixel custom lightsabers and those are pretty cool, but maybe its to do with the diffusion or maybe it’s not using enough power, but—in terms of brightness—I don’t I’ve seen anything like it.
Giz: The other big challenge seemed to be the spooling part of the design. How did you eventually decide on a circular winch?
Uy: Originally, to save space, we tried to spool the LED strip around a tank tread mechanism. The problem with that, which we only realized when we started testing, is that the LED strip—which has PCB and the silicon epoxy covering—it resists when you bend it into a shape. Then it wants to stay in that shape. So when we tried to extend the strip, it just wouldn’t extend. When you bend it in a circle it’s just a constant radius, so there’s really minimal resistance to it coming out or retracting.
Giz: What was the diameter of the handle that you guys went with?
Uy: It’s two inches for the thinnest part, and then we have all the griblies that extend out.
Giz: So you can still grip it in one hand?
Uy: Yeah, and I think personally I keep wanting to get it thinner, and that’s what we’re working on right now. I think thinking we can get a bit thinner and then I just watched The Acolyte, and I was like wow, those hilts are massive. Even though we can get it a bit thinner, I think we’re honestly in a pretty good spot right now.
Giz: It reminds me of, I don’t know if you ever had any of the telescoping lightsabers as a kid because when you had small kids’ hands, you couldn’t get your fist around it. So that’s what it first reminds me of, actually, and in that way, it’s kind of nostalgic. You said you had some other lightsabers. Which other ones do you own?
Uy: I had a custom Saberforge blade. I’ve had the Galaxy’s Edge lightsaber, which is also what we used as reference for our version, though they’re a little bit bigger than the movie-accurate version. I’ve had one from this company called The Pach Store, and they make some pretty good stuff.
Giz: What’s the plan for when you’re making the retracting lightsaber Mark Two?
Uy: We definitely want to make the hilt thinner but also make it extend and retract much faster. The plan is to have the entire hilt made out of metal. The big problem is still when you still look at it from the side, it’s got that dark saber effect because of the way we designed it with the single LED strip. So we do want to try and spin the whole thing and the inner assembly at least to create like that full-blade effect. That’s the really interesting challenge.
Giz: How do you think you’re going to make that work?
Uy: We were planning to do that from the start. That’s why the inner chassis is all in one assembly that holds everything together, and that outer shell is really just an aesthetic piece you can slide on. The original plan is just to rotate the whole inner chassis with a motor and a battery on the end. I was wondering if all that spinning would also through the LED strip off the magician’s cane, but it didn’t in any of our tests. As long as we don’t spin it above a certain speed, we’re fine.
Giz: How’s that gone so far?
Uy: It looks really good, but control-wise, it becomes hard because the buttons are now rotating at roughly 1,200 RPM. The motion sensors with the sounds effects go heywire because they’re like ‘what is happening? Why is there so much spinning?’ I think the way to counteract that is to switch to a Bluetooth control system, and then we can use an additional module and shift the buttons there. As for the motion sensing, we’re going to contact the makers of the board who helped with the first version. We got a bunch of comments suggesting we put in some diffusion layers, but I think this is the closest thing I’ve seen to what the blade should look like. I’m worried another layer would detract from that.
Giz: You have to think it’s a blade made of plasma. It should be pretty hard to look at.
Uy: It should be fricking bright.
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