A masterpiece

An image of the fully illuminated lightsaber.

"The blade is made up of 84 high-brightness blue LEDs, 14 per segment, in what we call a 'string blade' in the hobby," Lewis says. "A string blade such as the ones I make allow the blade to progressively light up along the length, and maintain even brightness along the length from base of the blade to the tip. This lets me also do the bar-graph MP3 player mode."

Using a string of LEDs gives the 'saber a shine unlike conventional builds. "Most custom-lightsaber builders use a single, extremely high-brightness LED in the base of the blade, shining up into a hollow diffused polycarbonate tube," Lewis notes. "The advantages of this are ease of assembly and [being] more affordable, but the light tends to be brighter at the base, and dim by the time it gets to the tip."

The enthusiastic 'saber builder explains why the Crystal Focus LED String (CF-LS) soundboard works so effectively. "String blades are very tedious to build, and require a slightly different power source and driver than most single LED lightsaber configurations," Lewis says. "The soundboard must be able to light up each segment progressively to simulate the extending of the blade. Previous to the CF-LS, this was done by harvesting circuitry from Hasbro Force FX lightsabers, and hot-rodding them to drive better and more LEDs."

Enjoy another video showing the completed movie prop replica and its innards: