anipixel

A full spectrum LED lightsaber blade

InDustrial Design

A personal project I started working on in June 2023 when I identified a need for these in the market.

Problem

Standard lightsaber (and other LED light strips) generally use a 5050 IC RGB LED which utilizes light diodes with a limited range of colors.

Solution

By increasing the saturation and color diodes used in the manufacturing of the LED’s, we can create a product that can show deeper blues and red (opposite sides of the spectrum) resulting in not only blue’s and red’s more saturated but everything in between as well.

The whole crux of this problem can essentially be broken down with the simple diagrams above. On the standard wavelengths of a controllable RGB LED, whenever they were being designed they designed them with values of red being 620-625nm, green being 520-525nm and blue being 465-470nm for whatever reason. The effects of this make a very orange-ish red and the blue being a bit lighter giving the overall appearance when viewed as being washed out. 

This can “simply” be fixed by changing those red and blue values to be further out on each end of the axis. To my surprise when I first contacted my LED manufacturer he let me know that it was no problem to use different light diode wavelengths in the creation of the LEDs, and even mentioned they already use some of these other diodes for things like plant growing lights. My new proposed color range was this, red: 655-660nm and blue: 450-455nm which you can see illustrated above.

Thus began the process to make some test strips to test the theory out. I contracted a PCB designer to help me with the process and made a spec sheet to start to convey what I was wanting. We worked really close to design the strip and matching blade adapter pcb for lightsabers.

After working extensively with my PCB designer, LED manufacturer and PCB fabricator I got back prototypes of the first sample.

This is where I faced my first big challenge. Although all things considered with the PCB being relatively simple with just LEDS, resistors and a capacitor things went south. Due to my only novel understanding of electronics, when sending the spec sheet to my designer we overlooked the LEDs orientation and pinout and accidentally had all the LEDs rotated 180 degrees in the wrong direction. After this point I went back to my PCB designer and we started to troubleshoot the design. Luckily all things considered, the prototype was still usable and just needed the data line of the electronics wired up to the top.

This hurdle was nowhere near enough to stop me and one of the main reasons I only got a few small test strips produced to continue the research and design of the product. After rigging up the data pin to the top it worked perfectly and I was able to complete the strips with their proper diffusion tubes.

This completed the research and prototyping of the anipixels with just a small change on how the LEDs are placed and has been fixed in the production design files. The full product is now under production and will be completed within the next couple months.