How To Build A Neopixel Lightsaber | IN DEPTH TUTORIAL

today I'm going to teach you how to build a lightsaber at least how I like to do it in this video I will do my very best to go over as much as possible when it comes to building a lightsaber that means I'll be covering all the parts tools and equipment that you'll need to make one as well as some tips tricks and other things to keep in mind during the process I decided to use the desert wander by KR Sabers and corand for this video tutorial this is because my customer wanted a basic profy install and I think that's a great setup for anyone just starting out with building lightsabers who still wants a top tier lightsaber although since this is a thin neck it will be a bit more challenging before we get started I just wanted to say that this video took me a very long time to make so if you like it and want to see more please like And subscribe so I can keep making them with that I hope you're ready to learn because this is one long and jam-packed video so sit back get ready to take some notes and let's get started so first I'm going to go over all the parts and electronics you're going to need for this lightsaber build you can find each and every one of these at the saber Armory or you could go to saber Bay which is where you can also find uh profy board neopixel connect connectors some speakers but uh the saber Armory is where you can find the desert Wanderer you can also go to Corban as well I'm going to be putting links in the description to each of these stores that I mentioned I'm also going to be putting links directly to the parts that I use so feel free to just head down to the description to look at all that I'm also going to have resources like the manuals that you you're going to want to reference along with different Amazon links to the different tools that I have here I've got some tools here that's over 6 and 7 years old so I don't exactly remember where I got them from so the links are going to be to things that are very similar to what I have if I can't find the exact one all right so first up here we have the chassis this is just a simple Eco chassis from the saber Armory it's for the profy board and the difference between profy and cfx is mainly in terms of um Dimensions so a a cfx is wider than a profy board profy board is a little bit skinnier so when you have a chassis specifically for one board or another they're not going to fit each other so this fits specifically profy will not fit a cfx likewise a cfx chassis is not going to fit a profy so that's something you need to keep in mind make sure you get the get the chassis that fits the soundboard that you want next up we have two other parts for the chassis it comes with the chassis you don't have to worry about it you don't have to worry about getting them separate or anything it comes with the purchase of the chassis you've got this guy right here which is a neopixel connector for the body area that's what connects the top of the chassis to the bottom of the neck section so you can remove the chassis this this one here that's a little bit smaller as you can see one's taller one's smaller the smaller one goes into into the emitter it holds the neopixel connector up there and for any chassis you get for any lightsaber you're going to want to check to make sure it fits in the hilt itself cuz sometimes the diameters can be a bit off in which case you're going to want to sand it down a little bit make some minor adjustments next we have these neopixel connectors these are the stock V3 neopixel connectors there are different variations you can get ones without LEDs you can get ones um that have less LEDs the Eco versions or you can get just different connectors alog together that aren't from stock but I like the stock v3s cuz they give you the most amount of LEDs on there and it gives you a bunch of different options in the back if you see here it has a section for blade detection it's got two different spots for data and you can set it up in multiple ways I'll be showing you the manual for that later and you can also check out the manual for the stock v3s in the description of video and here is our soundboard this is the profy 2.2 um I tend to use profy boards or cfx sound boards since those are the two top tier lightsaber soundboards that you can find profy board I would say is a lot easier to solder to cuz the the little solder pads have massive holes so it's very easy to put them in very straightforward there's no tiny uh solder pads at all like with the cfx it's pretty well laid out um but I do like the cfx in terms of how how you program it on the computer cuz you just do it all on the SD card really really easily it's a bit more tricky to set this up on the computer at the moment and it's also a little bit trickier to set up all the different uh blade Styles and the different effects that you can have on here and any kind of different special setups you want to do it's a little bit trickier if you don't know how to code uh there are tons of resources though that'll help you out like the fet 263 website which is absolutely amazing so profit board incredibly good very popular and it's one of the best in the business now here we have the battery section this is the battery 18650 lithium ion battery uh I got this from the saber Armory as well you can also get some from saber Bay um the custom saber shop any of those places to get get a good 18650 battery I know there's different stipulations as to what a good battery for a lightsaber would be but this is a good size that that's the standard for most of these neopixel lightsabers so I always just stick to this and then here we have the battery tabs the positive here and then we have the negative these come with the chassis as well so you don't have to worry about getting these but if for some reason it either doesn't come with it or let's just say you make your own chassis you can buy you can buy these at the saber Armory saber Bay all the same spots you could also get them on Amazon so pretty much anywhere you can get some some battery tabs that fit your chassis and another note if you buy a chassis that doesn't come with battery contacts you're always going to want to check to see what type they use and you can kind of tell by the battery contact ports here there are about three different standard ones that I can think of that have been used in the past for different chassis I use one with the spring I also Ed these sometimes uh these are very nice cuz it keeps everything nice and small in chassis designing everything is nice and compact now this is the kill switch you don't necessarily need this in every lightsaber cuz you can just remove the battery um but it's very useful very nice if you want to leave the battery in and if you just want to keep everything nice and safe but again you don't necessarily need it in a light lightsaber build with a removable battery but it's always a very nice feature to have the last electronic part that we have is the speaker this one is a 28 mm speaker you're going to want to check to make sure that whatever speaker you get for your lightsaber build will fit your lightsaber this one is built specifically for a 28 mm speaker so 28 mm speaker I know sometimes like with my last my last build I built a Revan lightsaber it said it was a 28 mm speaker chassis but it seemed to only fit 24 mm I don't know what was up with that so I had to sand down the speaker chamber to fit the 28 mm speaker so you're always going to want to check to make sure everything fits before you start putting everything together I tend to ignore that step since I build a lot of lightsabers I kind of just assume that they all fit which is not great so always make sure they fit before you start installing everything or else it's just going to be annoying and I guess I'll give a note on the type of speaker this is a 28 mm speaker from Smuggler Outpost they make one of the best if not the best speakers just in terms of how they sound cuz I've tested quite a few speakers and I think I like I like the way that these ones sound the best but any 28mm speaker will work okay I'm filming this a bit late but I forgot to add these into the parts list these are two red tactile switches you're going to want to get them from the saber Armory or the saber Bay the link will be in the description this is another part you're going to need I'm adding this in later because like with the buttons I forgot to add this to my initial parts list this is called a blades side connector it's going to be going on the bottom side of the next section inside the grip right under here now I'm going to go over all the different tools that you might need some of them are necessary some of them are not necessary but I'll be going over each one individually so I'll show you what you may need now one of the most important things you're going to have that you can't skip out on is solder I have 6040 rosin cor solder that I bought 7 or 8 years ago now haven't run out I bought it at a Radio Shack before they all shut down you can see that right there but yeah as you can see I've made a bunch of lightsabers and I haven't even gone through half of it yet so all you need is one good purchase of solder and you're never going to need to replace it again the reason I have the Rosen cor solder is because on the inside of this solder is flux which allows the solder to flow a lot easier on the solder pads and just makes everything look a lot cleaner and here we move on to two more things that I consider to be absolutely necessary one is wire strippers that go from 20 gauge to 30 gauge it's kind of tricky to find some of these I tried to go to a lot of different stores many many years ago these are the same on I've had since I started like 6 seven years ago making my first one but you definitely need one that goes all the way up to 30 gauge wire cuz that is going to be the smallest wire that I use and these are also incredibly useful cuz you can use this part to cut the wire you can use each one of these to strip the wire it's just invaluable as a tool and here are some tweezers you're going to want to get a set of tweezers I only have this one that I've had for maybe 7 years now and as you can see they're really bent old they don't really grip very well but you're going to going to want a bunch of these to help you out with just grabbing all the tiny little tools and wires putting everything in place without using your hands these are very very important next we have a soldering iron here we have a new soldering iron that I just got my girlfriend got it for me for uh Christmas I believe and this is actually only the third soldering iron I've ever had the first two were $8 $10 ones on Amazon it did its job so I never felt like replacing them but it's definitely helpful to be able to control the temperature by hand here Plus it also heats up a lot faster than my old ones along with your soldering iron even if you don't get this exact one you're going to want to get brass wool this brass wool here is vital to keeping your soldering iron as healthy as possible and you're going to want to just do this every time you do some soldering just to clean the tip a little bit my first soldering iron ever broke because it gave me a sponge that I had to wet and then use it to clean the tip never do that it completely ruins the soldering iron so just use brass wool and you're going to be fine now we move on to glue you're going to want to have E6000 I found that this is incredibly helpful with gluing things down not permanently very easy to remove the glue while maintaining a really strong bond once it cures the downside is that it takes forever to actually cure so you need to hold the parts down and wait for it to cure when using Loctite and super glue you need to be very careful you kind of need to know where you're gluing how much you're gluing just to be incredibly careful cuz I've broken many buttons many spring-loaded pins and just caused a lot of trouble from using super glue so the upside of using superg glue is that it hold something really quickly you don't have to wait a long time for them to stay but that's also the downside because if you mess up you're going to break something it's going to be really annoying to replace and the glue is not easy to remove and now we'll move on to the last things that I consider to be essential this guy here is a small hobby Vie it doesn't really secure itself to the ground very well uh it's supposed to do some sort of suction cup thing but I've never actually gotten that to work so I just keep it here and make sure I don't knock it over but what this is useful for is holding everything in place you can put your speaker in here you can put your neopixel connector in here I like to put the neopixel connector in here so I can put the pins on it and then it also holds it in place for when I have to put the wires on the other holding device are these Helping Hands as you can see I have added little alligator clips that have no teeth because the teeth are going to be damaging the wires or any parts that you have in it so the no teeth ones are essential so if you have these two holding devices you should be absolutely set you can use one to hold the part and the other one to hold the wire and all you have to do is put some solder on it and it's all perfect you'll be able to see how I use them when I build the lightsaber we're on to another essential thing you should have heat shrink I have a whole variety pack here I only really use the really small ones or sometimes these bigger ones here but I never use the large ones but definitely have an assortment of heat shrink and here I have a bunch of wires I used to have them in boxes which is really annoying to use so I decided to move them under my desk and now it's really easy I've got these ones here and I also have these on the other side you're going to want to get multiple colors of 22 gauge 24 gauge 28 gauge and 30 gauge wire there's going to be a wire gauge chart on the the profy board manual so you're going to want to refer to that whenever you have a question on what gauge you should use for what part but I'm also going to tell you throughout the process if you don't want to buy a bunch of extra wires you don't want to be using I'll give you a list of which ones I use for 22 gauge wire I only use two colors red and black for the positive and negative power lines for 24 gauge wire it's also red and black for positive and negative now for the 28 and 30 gauge wire I use all the different colors that came in the package red green yellow blue white and black this is because most Parts especially the extra features that I like to add like the OLED display Bluetooth blade detection etc those all don't really need that much power most Parts in the lightsaber actually only need 28 or 30 gauge wire it just depends on what fits in your lightsaber how much space you need Etc but it's important to use the right wire gauge or else you're going to be giving something too much power or too little power and things aren't going to work appropriately now we have some not so necessary stuff that I think is extremely useful still first up we have some grease this is going to be for all of the threading in your lightsaber if it's too rough you can just make it a lot smoother this way there's some that squeak like crazy that that's just really annoying so grease amazing next a plain old pair of scissors I use these most often to cut the battery tabs on the lightsaber chassis Eye Design but for most chassis you don't actually need to cut anything off of the battery tabs and then we have some small wire cutters and also some rubber bands I use the rubber bands to hold the parts in place while the E6000 dries you may also want to get some sanding sheets to sand down chassis or other parts I also have different sizes of screwdrivers in case the hilts that I'm installing have some screws that need to be unscrewed a flashlight can also be useful cuz there are some dark spots inside the hilt when you're installing everything I forgot to mention but a micro USB cable is essential for setting up the profy on your computer along with the micro SD card reader now that we've gone over all the parts and tools that you might need let's move on to installing the lightsaber okay so I like to begin my lightsaber builds by having a look at the hilt itself having a look at how it should be installed what are used as the buttons where the speaker is going to go and generally how everything is going to get put together so let's go ahead and take this apart and have a look so from what it seems like I can't really unscrew this grip section from the clamp I'm not going to try any harder than that cuz you don't want to break anything next I know that this neck section completely comes off which is useful for when we set up the neopixel connectors in the neck the tricky part about thin neck lightsabers is the fact that you have to run wires through here without snapping them when you set the neopixel connectors in place I'll be showing you that later and how I get around it you're always going to want to be careful when unscrewing these things because sometimes if you grip onto them too hard and it's too hard to unscrew them you can cut yourself I've cut myself quite a few times on the Luke lightsabers and these things can be really really sharp so just be careful the desert wander lightsaber is very interesting because it has two sections to the emitter this top part and then this base part it also has a very unique blade plug retention System since as you can see there are no retention screws here here if I can get it to focus this blade plug actually gets held in place because this top section has a little lip and when you screw it on it just holds everything together kind of like a sandwich okay so I've been trying to unscrew the rest of this cuz I'm pretty sure each of these is a separate part but for some reason it's not working so I'm just not going to try and push it if you wanted to you can get yourself a vice and you can just clamp it in make sure you put some towels or tape around it to make sure it doesn't get scratched up or anything and then you can use something to help give you some torque to pull it open but since it's not entirely necessary I can get everything set up this way I'm just going to leave it as it is the bottom section also seems really stuck cuz I know that the pommel comes off but for some reason I can't seem to get it off I also don't have a vice with me I'll need to buy that in the future so I'm just going to leave it as it is cuz again it's not very necessary this part does Come Undone though which is good because this part is necessary to open up here we go now I'm going to test the chassis to make sure everything fits this is how I like to put the chassis into the lightsaber once everything is all functional I like putting it in through the pommel here we go and as you can see this little lip stops right there and then the pommel cap goes right over it holds it in place and it gives the speaker a really nice resonance chamber this is one of the loudest lightsabers I've ever built there we go now I just want to make sure it fits in here which it does okay fits in there it's a little tight but it works there we go and then the buttons they can be pressed the buttons go right right here and then I'm just going to test the rest of the chassis parts to make sure they fit if they don't I'll sand them down to make sure that they do this part goes inside of the grip section here there we go you won't be able to see it maybe I'll get a flashlight here can you see it at all we have the ring all the way at the bottom so that works perfectly now we just got to test the emitter there we go works great don't need to sand any of the chassis let's open up the speaker to make sure it fits in the chassis as well cuz again I had an issue with the previous lightsaber that I built so you always want to test it there we go fits perfectly but the neopixel connectors I know they're not going to fit immediately because it has these little fin things you're going to want to sand these down hold on let me focus on it there we go so if you see it's got these little Frills here that you're going to want to sand down you sand it down to just enough so it has some friction to hold it in place or if you sand it down too much you can always just glue it in place it's just a bit looser uh but the glue will secure it now I'm going to test the profy board to make sure it fits there we go perfect fit so I grabbed these red buttons cuz they're pretty standard sized and I decided to put them into the button location there you go they fit perfectly right in these little spots and then I put the chassis in you want to put it in carefully because if you put it in a bit too fast and let's just say the buttons are a bit too tall these button press plunger things at the bottom are going to just snap the button the tactile button underneath it's going to break it completely I've done that to quite a few buttons which is very very bad so just be careful and feel it out make sure you don't have too much tension or anything cuz if it is you'll break the button and if those are your only buttons you're going to have to wait for another set but as you can hear it's the perfect size you can hear a great click and it's exactly where they need to be so these buttons are the ones that I'm going to be using if any of you have seen my other build videos you might know that I like to start with a neopixel connector so that's what we're going to start with a neopixel thin neck lightsaber that has a removable chassis is separated into two main parts you've got the top of the neck and the bottom of the neck the top of the neck is the emitter this is where the neopixel goes and it sits inside of this neopixel holder the second part is the bottom of the neck which sits inside of the grip section here it goes right on the underside inside of here the tricky and annoying part of setting up a thin neck lightsaber is the wire management it can be pretty tricky to have the right length of wire in here cuz if you have it too long it doesn't fit too short and you can't solder to the neopixel connector so I'll be showing you how I set up a thin neck lightsaber first I like to set up the blade side connector which goes inside of the handle on the underside of the neck I have to first make sure that this one fits inside of its holder looks like it fits perfectly fine just snaps right in now this blade side connector is also made from stock custom Works who made the neopixel connector this blade side connector comes with a resistor you don't necessarily need it but if you do want to add it you can put it right here on the data spot it should be bridging these two pads here the reason why I say you don't necessarily need that resistor is because you only really need one resistor on the data line and for most lightsabers that data resistor actually exists inside of the blade itself I don't remember what resistance this resistor has but you can always check in the manual to see what you need but I think it might be 330 if you take a closer look at the back side of the blade side connector you can see it has a few different solder pads you've got positive negative data another negative and another positive you can see the positive is the outside Circle the data is right in the center and the negative is right in between the positive and the data that matches up to the other side which is the data negative and positive Rings it is very important that you never mix up the positive and negatives I've done that a few times and I've fried different components it's very bad I've probably fried almost every single part that you can possibly fry just because I accidentally swapped the positive and negative pads so you're always going to want to make sure double check triple check that the positive and negatives are not swapped and they're in the right spot so let's get started on cutting the right length of wire so let's start by using two 22 gauge wire one for the positive and one for the negative what I like to do is either route the wire through the channel it's going to be in or go on the outside and just generally measure the length of it since it's pretty easy I'm going to Route it through for this one so I'm going to have it stick out a little bit here stick out a little bit up here as well I'm going to give some extra space just in case if you're not sure how much length you need always air on the side of caution get a little bit more than you need that way if you mess up you always have some more length to work with and then you just chop it generally where you need it there you go and since the positive and negative wire are going in the same place I'm going to use the wire I just chopped to measure out the other wire there we go now we need one more wire that's going to be the data line I'm going to use this 30 gauge green wire after you've cut the wires to the length that you want you're going to want to strip just enough to cover the solder pad so if you compare it here it's going to be just about that much there you go I tend to just eyeball these things though here you go we have the 22 gauge negative wire in The Wire Strippers here you just clamp it down and then you just pull it out and you've got the stripped wire and you're going to want to do that for each one of these now to sld the wires to the connector I'm going to use this little hobby Vie that I showed you in the beginning and actually for the data wire you're going to want to strip a little bit more than necessary because you're going to want to connect these two separate pads if you don't connect them this isn't going to work so I stripped the wire a little extra long so that I can cover both pads for soldering if you have something with an adjustable temperature I like to set it to somewhere around this section which I believe is 550° f about 275° C you can adjust it however you'd like but I find that anything up here is way too much for me this is about the range that works really well but I'm definitely not an expert on soldering so don't take my word for it this is just what works for me so for your build just find whatever melts the solder the best so here I'm going to do what's called pre- tinning where you put solder on the pads before you you solder the wire to it this just makes it so it's really easy to connect the wires later the general idea with soldering is you want to heat the pad and put the solder to the soldering iron and it just melts to the pad and since this is Rosen cor solder the flux allows it to flow really [Music] smoothly it doesn't really matter which pad you solder the positive and negative to as long as the negative is on a negative pad and a positive is on the positive pad you could either put them right next to each other or you could stagger them I think for this build I'm going to solder all the wires to one side of the connector okay so on top of pre- soldering the connector pads themselves you're going to want to do the same to the exposed portion of the wires so if you see here I have some solder sticking out of the spool so I can easily pre-tin these wires and then with both the connector and the wire pre-soldered all you have to do is put the wire down and then just melt the solder together and there you go we'll do it for the positive and negative as well there we go snapped right in place holds itself pretty nicely but we're going to want to put some E6000 in there just to be safe I also like to have some E6000 on the joints themselves that way they're a bit stronger for when we have to twist everything in place as I mentioned earlier the tricky part of thin neck lightsabers is preventing any kind of snapping so overall wire management is very important so having the E6000 on the solder joints just helps prevent any kind of breaking of course this isn't going to completely stop it from breaking but at least it'll make it a bit stronger so it's less likely to happen we're also going to want to put some glue on this Outer Rim here so we can stick it on the inside of this grip section there we go you can see some glue there now let's just put it inside of the hilt okay I got it in as you can see I kind of Twisted these wires together a little bit that way they all kind of stick together and you can thread it through small spaces a bit easier but you definitely don't want to over twist it I have done that in the past and when we end up putting the rest of the neck on it does put more tension on the solder joints so you're going to want to kind of unwrap it that way when we put the rest of the neck on when we twist everything in place it doesn't over twist we're going to want to hold this connector in place while it cures so I like to put the chassis inside of the hilt and then just put it all together that way it kind of keeps pressure on it all this chassis needs to be put through the back so I'm going to put on this back end the booster and the pommel section now we put on the chassis there we go and with everything in place we now have enough pressure on the connector and the connector holder so that everything cures in place properly now let's just thread the wires through the neck and out the emitter seems like it's a bit tight of a fit so I'm going to twist it again what you can also do to keep the wires sticking together so you can thread it through a small space is you can put some tape on it just wrap the tips up here there we go that way they're all stuck together so you can thread it through and see that makes it a lot easier so for now I'm going to completely screw in the next section so we have as much wire sticking out to solder as possible now we once again pre- solder the exposed portion of the wires now I'm going to move on to setting up the neopixel connector okay as you can see I've got the neopixel connector manual on the screen right now if we just have a look through here I'll show you the wiring diagram this will tell you everything you need to know about the neopixel connector and different ways for data inputs you have the V1 V2 V3 and V4 if you can see here the V1 is only for the blade and has no PCB LEDs on the connector itself I really like having LEDs on the neopixel connector so I never used a V1 setup for v2 it's the blade and PCB LEDs in parallel this is how the neopixel connector comes standard if I show you the neopixel connector next to the image we have two resistors here and here and then these pads are not connected which is exactly what this one is two resistors and these two pads are not connected blade plus PCB LEDs in parallel essentially just means that the LEDs on the connector is just going to mimic the blade with the V3 setup the blade and the PCB LEDs are wired in series which essentially mean that the LEDs on the connector act as the first 16 pixels of the blade length the V3 setup allows you to have a little bit more flexibility in what happens with the 16 LEDs on the PCB itself now the most flexible setup is the V4 which has the blade and PCB LEDs wired independently that means each of them is controlled by their own data line now as you can see the differences between all of these setups is whether or not the resistors exists in the R1 and the R2 spot and whether the D2 pads are connected or not since this is a removable chassis thin neck lightsaber and we're using the blad side PCB we really only have one spot for a data so that only allows us to use either V1 V2 or the V3 setup for the emitter neopixel at least but for this build I'm just going to leave it in the V2 setup which is the one that it comes with so now we have one of the more fun parts of each lightsaber build putting the pins in the neopixel connector I kind of just like putting the pins on the floor next to the little Vice that I have and then I just pick it up with these tweezers to plop it in now that I have all the pins in their respective holes I'm just going to lock them all in place with solder when doing this I found that the easiest way is to aim your soldering iron towards the pad that the pin is on and it just melts the solder a lot easier just allows it to flow better there you go but sometimes you can't hit it so it's perfectly fine if you aim for the top of the pin the more you do it the more you'll get used to it then I'm going to pre- solder the pads that we're putting the positive negative and data lines to now before we put this in the emitter and solder the wires to it you just want to make sure that it fits inside of the neopixel connector holder and as you can see like I mentioned earlier you're going to want to sand down these little Frills to make it [Music] fit there we go now fits really nicely now the correct order of operations to do this is to put the neopixel connect connector holder in over the wires and into the emitter first and then solder the neopixel connector to the wires this seems self-explanatory but I've messed this up so many times that I thought I'd mention it it'll just save you the trouble of having to unsolder and resolder the connector here you can see I'm using the Helping Hands with the toothless alligator clips and I'll just adjust the height here so the wires go to where I need them and then I'll use my tweezers to move the wires onto the pad when I solder and now we have all the wires soldered in place now we're getting closer to the scary part let's take the neopixel connector holder pull it up and then put the neopixel connector in it and I'm going to add some E6000 to the connector and to the bottom of the holder so that it all holds in place at the bottom of the emitter you definitely don't need to use as much E6000 as I do but I like to do it just to make everything really really sec here I still have nightmares about setting up thin neck lightsabers where the wire snaps and I have to redo everything multiple times now the tricky part is to put the neopixel connector at the bottom of the emitter while having all the wires in the next section the way I like to do that is straighten out the neopixel connector that we just glued and then unscrew the neck once the neck is all the way unscrewed pull it up and push the neopixel connector down into the bottom of the emitter this makes it so that the wires don't Clump up underneath the neopixel connector and underneath the holder and it is just existing ing inside of the neck itself now you're going to want to maintain pressure downwards on the neopixel connector as you push the rest of the neck down and rescrew it in place make sure that you do this very slowly and methodically I don't like to screw it in place too quickly cuz I feel like it puts unnecessary pressure on the wires and the solder joints plus when you go slowly you can feel if anything snaps on the inside and there we go screw it all the way in I don't think I felt any snaps happen it actually felt really really smooth so the next thing you're going to want to do is make sure to hold the neopixel connector and the holder completely still so that the E6000 can cure I like to do this by putting in the blade plug and then making sure that is secure and it just maintains pressure on all of it while it cures and with that we're done with the emitter and next section so now we just have to wait for the E6000 to cure in the emitter and the blades side PCB and since we Ed the chassis to hold the blades side PCB in place while it cures we can't really install anything in the chassis for the time being so for now while we wait I'm going to set up the other neopixel connector that's going to go on the top of the chassis now with the chassi neopixel connector you can actually set it up in any of the various ways that I showed you on the manual so for me a lot of the time I like to set it up in the V4 formation with the two data lines I also like adding the blade detection wire which goes right here but once again this is just a basic profy build no extra features so we're just going to leave it in the V2 formation without the chassis it's a bit harder to measure exactly how much wire I need to cut so I'm just going to leave it as it is wait for it to cure and then I'll be right back okay I am back it is now a few hours later and I believe this should be cured enough for me to remove the holds from it so let's remove the chassis all right if I remember correctly oh we're going to need to grease this up like I mentioned earlier some of these hilts need greasing or else it's going to squeak like crazy the chassis is is now out now we can get to work on cutting the wires to size so since I'm setting up the neopixel connector first I cut all the wires to size I have 2 24 gauge negative wires one 30 gauge data line and I have one 22 gauge positive line that'll get connected directly to the positive tab for the battery so to cut the wire I basically just did what I showed earlier in this video where I route the wire through where it's going to be this is going to connect to the soundboard over here and it's going to come out to the neopixel connector on this side the reason why I have two 24 gauge negative wires is because on the profy board there are two spots to put the negative wires of the neopixel connector on the crystal Focus soundboard there's four slots so typically I take two 24 gauge negative wires and then I split them at the end into four total two on this side and two on this side so you can either have two 24 gauge wires like I have here or one 22 gauge wire and you split it off at the end to connect to the profy board I'm going to quickly show you the profy board wiring diagram that I'm going to be using and it's a good reference for you guys for when you set up your own lightsaber so here's the profy board wiring diagram that I'm using you can set it up in multiple different configurations you can just go through each one of these and then you can set it up and it'll tell you how you should wire it to the proy board it'll also set you up with a basic config file that you can use for now let's just have a look at this wiring diagram I set it up with a kill switch like we have in our build here you should be able to get a good basic understanding on why I chose the amount of wires I chose and how I'm routing everything in the chassis itself for our build this is the neopixel connector as you can see the positive line is going to go straight to the kill switch and then the the kill switch is going to go to the soundboard and then the 18650 lithium ion battery the positive to that goes straight to the kill switch and it connects with the Positive from the neopixel connector so what I'm doing is setting up the positive of the neopixel connector to go straight to the positive of the battery and then I'm going to have the line from the battery go straight to the kill switch what you could also do is set the positive of the battery going straight to the neopixel connector and then having align from the neopixel connector go to the kill switch both ways work and here you can see what I was talking about from the negatives of the neopixel connector this is if you have one 22 gauge wire and split split it off to connect it to the soundboard what I'm doing is I have the neopixel connector with two 24 gauge wires so I don't have to split it at all they just go to their own respective spots and here you can see where you set up the speaker you've got your activation switch and your auxiliary switch this is showing that you connect the two ground wires from the buttons I'll be showing you how to do that later ignore the recharge Port we don't have it in our build but I can't remove it from this configurator so the negative from the battery goes straight to the negative on the board if you see here I like to have one spot for the button negative and one spot for the battery negative it doesn't really matter since they're connected but it's just easier this way so I don't have to connect them outside this shows you where the data line goes and it also shows you where the positive wire goes so yeah this is a great resource showing you where to wire everything this just makes it really really easy to comprehend and set up and of course the profy board manual will tell you exactly what each of these pads do now we're back to the neopixel connector for now I'm just going to set up the two negative wires and the data line strip the wire more wire stripping and I'm once again going to be pre- tinning these wires I don't know if I mentioned earlier but these two spots here are your negative pads right in between your three pins that you soldered if you end up stripping a little bit too much of your wire you can always cut it down with your wire trimmers it's a good idea to keep the stripped part of your wire small enough so it doesn't stick out of the solder pad and hit something else I have a habit of twisting the wires together when I'm done sometimes it's useful sometimes it's not but at the very least it should be able to reduce a bit of strain on each of these joints especially this 30 gauge wire when routing your wires you always want to think about the best ways to conserve space in your chassis especially if it has as little space for wires underneath the board as this one does so what I like to do is put the soundboard where it's going to be in this case I have the micro USB port facing the speaker because this is how you're going to access and plug things in you've got all this empty space over here and the SD card I have on bottom because you won't be accessing that as much as you will the micro USB port so from the wiring diagram you can see that these two pins are the negatives of the neopixel connector and then one over here is the data so with that in mind you're going to want to Route the wires from the neopixel connector on this side of the chassis there we go wires are routed in the correct location wire management is going to be be incredibly important when you have something like this that has kind of cramped spaces and also when you start adding a bunch of extra features like the OLED display and Bluetooth the more wires you have the more important wire management will be and once again as you guys can see this doesn't quite fit so we're going to sand it down and now remember before we glue this we still have to set up the positive wire so next I'm going to show you guys how to set up the battery tab and the kill switch so first you want to make sure that the battery tabs fit where they're supposed to so let's put this positive in and as you can see it sticks up a little bit too much so what I'm going to end up doing is cutting the little tab off the bottom and I'm actually going to do the same thing with the negative contact the next thing i' like to check is to see which side of the battery tab I can solder the wire to and what determines that is the space in the the chassis itself as you can see you have a little bit of gap on the front of the battery tab section and you also have a little space on the back and in my builds I like to try and hide as many wires as possible so with this one I'm going to try soldering the wires to the back side of each of the contacts all right so here I have the wires that I'm going to be connecting to the battery contacts as you can see I have two positive wires like I mentioned before and then one negative wire all of Mark 22 gauge this positive wire is going to be going from the battery contact to the neopixel connector and this one is going from the battery contact to the soundboard and once again to get these lengths of wire I ran them through the chassis or just estimated where they would be and then cut them to size to make soldering the wire to the contact a little bit easier I'm going to solder them together now and then connect it to the contact later so for this chassis when you're routing the wires you have a little channel here at the back this is what allows me to have the wire on the back side of the contact since this little piece that holds everything together is very close to the back it barely leaves enough room for the wire which is why the channel is there and sometimes you'll need a little extra help so I like to use the back end of my tweezers to push things down and then this is where the wire sticks out so you just push it right back through the chassis and there there we go comes out right where you need it to attach it to the board there we are we're going to glue this down later with m6000 what's nice about this chassis is it has this little cutout here I'm not exactly sure what it's useful for I imagine you could put an LED there maybe a little plate to diffuse the light sort of as a faux Crystal chamber maybe but I think mainly what its purpose is is to allow you to reach inside and get the wires that you need so now we have the two battery tabs set exactly where they're going to need to be now let's work on the kill switch as you already know this wire is connected to both the battery and the neopixel connector so we already have this one positive wire that's going to be going to one of these outer pins now all we need is one wire that goes to this middle pin that'll go all the way to the board and once again the positive wire is going to be this 22 gauge wire that I cut to length since I have all this extra wire here I'm going to cut it to right about here which is all I'm going to need to solder to the kill switch since these little prongs are so thin and stick out so much they are liable to being bent and then touching each other you don't want that or else it's not going to be any use so sometimes what I do after I solder the wire to the two legs is cut off the extra leg and then bend these ones away from each other so they're less likely to touch now that is something that you probably shouldn't do and it's much easier if you just use heat shrink my logic with my other method is that there's typically not much space past the little legs in the chassis so when you set up the wire and heat shrink it prevents the wires from bending enough to put the kill switch in all the way and I figure in most chassis the battery tab the wire and the kill switch are in a space where there's not going to be any tension put on The Wire so the joints really aren't at risk of touching each other or moving so now that you know the pros and cons of both methods you can do whichever one you think is best for for you but for this particular build since you have so much space back there I highly recommend using heat shrink there are no excuses not to and before we solder on the wire from the chassis you're going to want to put the heat shrink over it cuz you won't have another chance otherwise so I'm going to show you how I shrink the heat shrink with my soldering iron you're pretty much just going to want to use this portion of the tip of your soldering iron not the soldered section because it's going to leave some behind on the heat shrink I like to try and roll the heat shrink as much as I can and there you have it heat shrink solder joints now we just have to push the kill switch into its spot and this is what the inside looks like after I've routed the wires you're going to want to make sure the kill switch is flat against the wall here cuz with this chassis design it has this open side which allows it to stick out a little bit sometimes so what I'm going to do is make sure it's flat put some 6,000 on it then it won't be moving let's go back to the positive wire going to our neopixel connector looks like we can cut off a little extra wire so let's do that then we can strip it now we can pre-tin it and now we put some solder on the positive pad and as you can see I'm using these Helping Hands and my tweezers to help put the wire exactly where I needed to be to solder it perfectly and there we have it we have the neopixel connector all set up the battery tabs and the kill switch eventually I'm going to be using E6000 to secure everything in place but for now let's move on to the speaker like I mentioned in the beginning this is a Smuggler Outpost 28 mm base speaker as far as I know pretty much all speakers are set up the same where it has these two solder pads on either side so technically one of these is a positive and one of these is a negative but it doesn't matter which one is which as long as they're separate from each other that's the nice part about speakers you don't have to worry about which side is which with speakers I like to use either 28 or 30 gauge wire it doesn't really matter which one you use but 30 gauge is normally good for if you have tight spaces in the chassis but since we have so much space might as well use 28 gauge 28 gauge wire is just a little bit nicer to use than 30 gauge 30 gauge likes to snap sometimes and 28 gauge of course is a little bit less likely to snip so it doesn't really matter what color your speaker wires are using black right now but I've used blue in the past and I've used other colors as well but like for most Parts in your lightsaber build as long as you know what wire it is and what part it's for it doesn't really matter what color you use and I think you guys have already guessed we're going to add some solder to these pads okay the speaker is all set up the wires reach where they need to be and before I put it in place I'm going to be putting E6000 on everything especially the kill switch to make sure it doesn't go anywhere and then we can move on to wiring up the buttons to help hold the positive tab in place while the glue is curing I actually have this really cool battery placement holder thing I got the STL file from saber Bay and I put this Crystal in myself it's just a pretty fun thing to put in the battery section when the battery is not in place but I actually found that this is really helpful to hold the battery tab in place while the glue is curing but since this negative isn't a spring sometimes the battery can be a bit loose so what I like to do is put some pliers or tweezers under here and just pull the tab a little bit up and just bend the metal there you go it sticks out a little bit more this is actually a little bit smaller in length than a battery so sometimes I unscrew the bottom just to make it a little bit taller there we go and that should be holding the positive tab in place while it cures let's move on to the two red buttons I'm going to be using as you can see there's four legs to each button now one of these legs is going to be the positive and one's going to be the negative the Only Rule you're going to need need to keep in mind with these buttons is that this one and this one are connected and then this one and this one are connected you can tell by looking at the bottom side it'll have a little pathway just a little Ridge so what that means is you're not going to want to have a positive and a negative on the same side since it's not going to allow it to work so you're either going to need to have the positive here and the negative on the opposite corner but the easiest way is to have a positive and a negative on the same side but not along this length where they're connected you'll be able to tell a lot easier in person you can actually tell a little bit which side is which these two are the sides that are not connected to each other while these two are connected to each other so you're going to want to have the positive and negative on this side or like I mentioned before positive on this side and then negative on one corner that's also one possibility so now let's pre-tin the legs as for which gauge of wire you're going to be using I either use 28 or 30 gauge if I don't need 30 gauge I'm going to use 28 gauge cuz like I mentioned before 30 likes to snap a little bit easier than 28 and with this chassis with all the space we have you don't need 30 gauge wires and here are the wires for the buttons I measured them out and cut them to length now we're just going to strip them and then pre-tin them since the legs on the buttons are a bit small you're going to want to pay a little bit more attention to how much wire you strip cuz if you do too much it's more liable to snap if you do too little it's not going to hold on enough so these are the buttons on the desert Wanderer I tend to like to have the bigger button be the activation while the smaller button is the auxiliary but you can just choose which one you like better and ultimately it doesn't matter which one of these buttons you use for which cuz you can always just switch it in the config file I like to use a yellow wire to indicate the activation button and a green wire to indicate the auxiliary button so you can use E6000 to glue down the buttons but I tend to use locktite because when you use E6000 you need to hold these in place using a rubber band and depending on where it is in the chassis that can be a bit difficult the thing about Loctite is it can be bit risky cuzz if you use tooo much it can seep into the button and prevent it from working and permanently break it so if you do decide to use Loctite make sure you know what you're doing and you use the right amount and you only do it once maybe twice maximum if you mess up because with Loctite if you mess up and have to redo it it leaves behind residue in these little spots pushing the button a little bit higher than it should be and sometimes it runs into the plungers of the button of the hilt and it can break the button top we now have all the parts wired up and glued where they're going to be in the chassis now we just have to prep these wires to solder to the soundboard so for right now I'm just going to go through and cut each one of these wires to the appropriate length for where they're going to be soldered to the soundboard I also like to take this time to connect any wires that need to be connected before they reach the soundboard for this build we only have one set of wires that need to be connected before they reach the soundboard and that would be the two negatives from the buttons okay with all these wires cut to the right length I'm going to show you how I connect wires into a single wire first I'm going to cut both of them to roughly the same length and then I'm going to strip a good amount of them as you can see I'm using the Helping Hands to help put these together so I can solder them and now we're going to take the single wire that we're going to solder the two wires to strip it and then solder it right to them make sure you pre-tin it as much as you can with all of this exposed you're going to want to use some heat shrink to cover it up I'm just going to cut this wire to be a little bit smaller now we have all of the wires cut to the length we want them at I'm going to strip each one of these and make sure you do not pre-tin these wires I'm going to repeat that don't pre-tin these that's going to be incredibly useful especially if you're wiring up to a cfx soundboard profy is a lot more forgiving because they have massive holes on the solder pads but on on cfx boards those holes are really really tiny and on one of them the LS2 is really really tiny so if you add any solder to it it's going to be too fat and it won't fit so for this one we just strip them do not pre-tin them we put them into the solder pad hole and then solder straight onto there I was told sometime somewhere I don't really remember that you don't want to solder with the SD card in so make sure you take that out before you do any soldering feel free to solder the wires on in any order you like doesn't really matter whichever you think is going to be easiest for you and I don't like doing all of them at once I do only a couple at a time and there we go all the wires have been soldered in place and if you've managed the wires correctly you should be able to just push it all down and then it'll just hold in place you may end up using a little bit of locktite in the corners or you could use Captain tape either one to hold it in place but if you opt with one of the more permanent Solutions it's a bit harder to access the micro SD card and the micro USB port although that shouldn't be too bad of an issue because you could just use a 90° angle micro USB and access the micro SD card by taking out the battery so if we take a look here and take out this battery holder you should be able to take out the micro SD card from the inside I'm now going to take the sound and the SD card add some fonts on it and install the config file that my customer actually set up himself I'll show you a little bit of that but I won't be going into all of the details on the software side of things in this video in particular to teach you guys how to set up the profy board on your computer I'm going to give you links in the description you're going to want to go to Frederick hub's website along with fet 263 I'll also leave a link to the video made by Powell's PowerUp who goes over how to do all of that in great detail for this video I'm just going to show you me putting the sound fonts on the SD card and uploading the config to the profy board and here you can see all the fonts my customer sent me to install on the lightsaber along with the config file that he made overall this config is pretty good I just had to make a couple adjustments to make it work perfectly so now that we have the SD card and the config set up we can plug this into the computer now we just have to upload it and here are all the settings that I have on Arduino and I'm just going to upload it straight to the profy board to me to you now that we have the entire profy board set up we can test to see if it all works now that we have everything complete the most fun but stressful part is to see if it actually works so we just got to put the battery in place negative to negative positive to positive what have you become works perfectly let's put it inside the hilt and see if if we built the neck correctly okay so I was testing it out and I discovered that when you put the pommel onto the lightsaber with the chassis on the hilt it tends to spin the Chassy ever so slightly so that the button doesn't get pressed properly by this so what I did was I moved this button downward ever so slightly and what I'm going to be doing is replacing one of the screws that holds this box in place with a slightly longer screw that sticks out and then guides along this chassis channel here what that's going to do is it's going to prevent the chassis from turning as much so when you screw in the pommel it won't turn and you can still be able to press these I was lucky cuz I had this screw extra for my own personal desert Wanderer build this was from KR Sabers while this is from Corban Corban doesn't provide extra things like the longer screws or a blade plug diffuser here so I just took this extra screw for my own KR Sabers version that way I can make this work and unfortunately I'm not entirely sure where you would find one of these screws on your own if you want one you can probably contact KR Sabers at the saber Armory or maybe even corand and they might be able to tell you where they can find or where you can find the screws there you go if you see inside a little bit you can see it sticking out ever so slightly right back there [Music] [Applause] sh now that we've tested the lightsaber and we know that everything works there's one final thing left to do before I end off this video and that's just to grease up all of the threads because they're not very good right now resistance [Music] [Music] and with that I'd say this project is now complete [Music] thank you all so much for watching this video I know it was super long so it means a lot that you sat through it all I tried my best to go over as much information as I could and even though this video might have turned out a little messier than intended I still think you should have enough information to get you started let me know what you guys think if you have any additional info or better methods of installing that you prefer please leave it down in the comments to help each other out I hope you like the video and good luck with your lightsaber build [Applause] [Music] Master Kenobi I am and when you have your strength I will help you on your way Ben Ben [Music] Kenobi obiwan Kenobi so what I told you was true from a certain point of [Music] view I'm quite gone too at last we will have [Music] Revenge count to good I sense countu General Grievous you're shorter than I expected Aman SK Walker Darth Vega where is [Music] he what is it Father's lightsaber this is the weapon of a Jedi Knight this artian has a b motivator Force to become a Jedi like my father [Music] I am a Jedi like my father before [Music] me hello master it's been a while Bano vatan sent [Music] me this part is [Music] over General Krell you're being relieved of Duty Esra Brier care to introduce your new friends Caleb I am bestan I am bana the last of the Jedi and the one who will stand with you against all enemies who face us [Music] I have found the [Music] Exile Darth [Music] Revan induction split [Music] [Applause] ancient [Music] integration sismic [Music] charges yogurt I hate yogurt even with strawberries I knew it I'm surrounded by [Music] the end is [Music] near [Music] prepare a boarding party Kobe want [Music] Kenobi k w Master Kenobi you disappoint me

Channel: Avery Castillo

Views: 20,814

Keywords: How To Build A Lightsaber, Lightsaber Tutorial, Neopixel Lightsaber Build, Obi-Wan Lightsaber, Desert Wanderer, Custom Lightsaber Build

Id: 4c_wzq9unRA

Length: 67min 9sec (4029 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 14 2023