It happened. I bought a 3D printer. And I figured out a cheap way to add some interesting light effects!
![Image]()
I went to a wedding last year & they had these foam lightsaber things at the reception. If you look up "foam party lights" on amazon you'll find tons of listings for them. Anyways, I kept mine & realized I could use it for this. When I ripped it open I found this tiny PCB:
![Image]()
(I chopped off the right side of the board that had a tiny button already on it)
After some tests I wired up my own button & new red LEDs. The board basically has two outputs for the lights so I arranged them to alternate with their flashing patterns. And it seemed to work fine with the battery pack from the fairy lights so I just used that since it was already tucked away behind the flap of the holster.
From there I measured things out & modeled all the parts using blender, using as many reference pics I could find to make a nicely scaled down version of the real calculator board/tube setup. It took a few test prints to get the friction fits working right on some of the pieces.
![Image]()
![Image]()
It was a tight fit to get the LED, button and PCB all tucked into that tiny box thingy. But overall it worked out great!
I went to a wedding last year & they had these foam lightsaber things at the reception. If you look up "foam party lights" on amazon you'll find tons of listings for them. Anyways, I kept mine & realized I could use it for this. When I ripped it open I found this tiny PCB:
(I chopped off the right side of the board that had a tiny button already on it)
After some tests I wired up my own button & new red LEDs. The board basically has two outputs for the lights so I arranged them to alternate with their flashing patterns. And it seemed to work fine with the battery pack from the fairy lights so I just used that since it was already tucked away behind the flap of the holster.
From there I measured things out & modeled all the parts using blender, using as many reference pics I could find to make a nicely scaled down version of the real calculator board/tube setup. It took a few test prints to get the friction fits working right on some of the pieces.
It was a tight fit to get the LED, button and PCB all tucked into that tiny box thingy. But overall it worked out great!
Statistics: Posted by Joeyvenkman — January 19th, 2024, 5:58 pm