Hey all,
So this isn't specifically tailored to a 2.0 build, but I thought I would share the way I wire up a simple light rig for a saber. You can complicate this very easily by adding bells and whistles. Just yesterday I wired one up just like this, but with a soundboard hooked up instead of just an LED. This is just a simple way of getting light, and more importantly, a working recharge port set up.
The parts used herein are:
A royal blue Luxeon LED
A 2.1 mm recharge port
3x 1.2V Tenergy NiMH AA sized batteries
A switch
Heat sink
Lens holder and lens
A bunch of wire, some heat shrink, and a bit of electrical tape, wire strippers, a radioshack soldering iron and some solder
First things first you want to assemble your battery pack. You want to use the iron to heat the battery before applying any solder. If you heat it too much the battery can pop on you, so I recommend holding the iron to the battery terminal with solder about a millimeter or two away from the iron. When the heat radiates outward and reaches the solder it will all start to melt and flow together.
It'll look like this:
And then like this:
When the solder flows like this and isn't just bubbling on the surface, it creates a strong bond with the battery or wire which will give you a proper strong solder joint.
Next you'll want to begin assembling the batteries from positive to negative.
I tape them together to hold shape and make it easier to solder. It's way easier soldering three at once than just two batteries. Here I've connected the first two batteries.
Now all three are soldered with the wires placed strategically to allow them to flow together. I tape or heat shrink the negative lead a little longer than the positive, so I always know which is which. Lots of people just use different colored wire, but this looks more elegant to me, and I don't seem to have any issue keeping it all straight.
So here you have three batteries, wired in series to each other. Each battery has 1.2V as opposed to the standard 1.5V that a AA battery will generally have. That means instead of 4.5 volts I am running 3.6 volts with this set up.
Now that your battery pack is wired up and ready to go you'll want to start the LED. This is really simple, just flow a small amount of solder onto a negative and positive pad and then attach two wires. I did them facing into the holes so that the wire would neatly feed through the heat sink.
Next is the recharge port. This one is from TCSS and works flawlessly. Here you can see me tinning the lead. This is just heating the pad and allowing a small amount of solder to flow onto it. The one on top has been tinned, while the others are still untouched.
Once the leads have been tinned you'll want to attach the wire going to the positive end of the battery pack and the wire that will eventually go to the positive lead of the LED to the rightmost part of the recharge port. I WILL BE REFERRING TO THE PORT WITH THE CENTER LEAD FACING DOWN, JUST LIKE IN THIS PHOTO. You do NOT want to confuse what goes where. Before soldering you should place a small amount of heatsink through the two wires, far enough away from the solder joint that residual heat will not shrink it prematurely.
That other positive wire will go to the switch, and eventually to the LED, like so:
As of right now, only the rightmost lead on the recharge port is accounted for. The simple drawing below gives you an idea of what is what however. As you can see, you can just wire the bottom most lead to the other wire coming from your battery pack, and solder a wire to the leftmost lead for the switch/LED portion of the circuit.
This is a simple drawing showing how I wired this entire thing together. As you can see it's a very pretty straight forward design, I just thought it might be easier for some people to see it drawn out like this without all the wires taped together and crossed.
The finished version should look a little something like this:
and with a flick of that switch
The batteries were straight out of the package and pretty weak, so I shot this photo and then put it to charge. So far no smoke so we're good to go!
So like I said before this is a bare bones way of adding light to a saber. If you're using an MR board, all you have to do is run the wires that go to the LED to the soundboard instead, and the rest follows pretty easily. If someone wants a continuation of this tutorial with an MR board and speaker I can gladly shoot some photos and show you guys.
The point of this post was to show you guys a few tricks or tips I use, and to hopefully make this a little clearer for some people that may not have much experience with soldering or circuits. You don't really need much to put together a saber with light, just a few batteries and an LED and a two dollar recharge port. I hope at least a few people find this helpful!
-Mili
