Just a few months after graduating from college, Jason Uy and his fellow engineers I made a lightsaberMany companies now make custom lightsabers complete with swoosh and other sound effects, not to mention Disney itself sells its Galaxy’s Edge blades at a premium. But the DIY lightsaber that Uy and his team built can be extended or retracted with the push of a button. Plus, it emits an intense light befitting a Force-sensitive kyber crystal-powered laser sword. It’s the lightsaber every Star Wars fan has always wanted.
Ui’s sword is similar to one Disney made for its own use, but it has never been on public display except for a display on the now-closed Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser. Ui demonstrated how the sword can be swung around without breaking on his YouTube channel, HeroTech. Disney engineers reportedly struggled with it.That’s probably why the company didn’t try to sell the retractable blades to die-hard Star Wars fans.
Uy developed the idea while attending Olin College of Technology in Massachusetts. His first creation was similar in style to Disney’s Star Wars razor blades, with his first prototype using an electric tape measure attached to an LED strip. Uy says that early lightsabers were “just a box.” To further develop the idea, he recruited two other students from the college, Maddie Tong and Aaron Codrington, to create an extendable lightsaber that could be held in one hand.
What’s particularly interesting about HeroTech’s sabers is what they used to create the telescoping section: Uy’s team adapted a magician’s wand that simply unwinds and folds to maintain its rigidity, with an LED strip providing the light and controlling the telescoping speed. Instead of the circular blade typical of the Star Wars films, it creates a “Darksaber” effect when viewed from certain angles. The YouTuber told Gizmodo that he plans to solve this problem by spinning the entire internal mechanism so fast that the sides become invisible.
Gizmodo spoke with Uy at length about his project and his plans for the future. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Gizmodo: Let me guess – have you been into Star Wars for a while? What made you decide to make your own instead of the usual polycarbonate style?
Jacob Uy: Oh, I’m a big fan. Ever since I was a kid. I loved lightsabers. I have so much respect for people who make lightsabers because it takes so much work, engineering, and testing to make one. I always thought it was a little weird that you have to glue the edge of the blade to make a good lightsaber, because to me, that’s not the lightsaber experience. I have so much respect for people who make lightsabers because it’s very hard to make. It’s expensive and it’s hard work.
Gizmodo: We’d love to hear how you all got started on this project and how it has evolved from your initial conception.
Jacob Uy: So I actually started this as a class project. Basically, we had a group project at the end of the term, and I did it with one of my friends. We both love Star Wars, so we had free reign to do whatever we wanted. We said, “What if we made a lightsaber?” For that end of term project, we were able to make an extendable blade, and it was huge. It was basically a motorized tape measure and a box with LED strips stuck on it. I wanted to take it further. I was working with two friends from college, Maddie, [Tong] Aaron [Codrington]Someone who was with me throughout the entire project.
Giz: Why did you take a different approach to designing lightsabers than Disney?
Ui: Disney is doing some interesting things. I think they developed their own tape measure blade, in a way, and their own plastic to get the light spread just right. There was a limitation during testing where they weren’t going to make a custom plastic just for this. When we were testing the version with the tape measure, we found that you couldn’t swing it around. It would just snap and flex all over the place. This may be a limitation that Disney faces as well.
Giz: So, what was your solution?
Ui: We tested a variety of different telescoping devices. We tried an antenna off an electric car. We even had a winch off an RC car. Then we looked at whether we could attach it to something that could extend or retract, like the telescoping features you see on toy lightsabers. A really old toy version had a spring-loaded one, but that still didn’t retract. Finally, we found a magician’s wand. It’s so small, it fits into a hilt, and it extends really long and quickly, so we realized this could be the solution. It’s unlike any other design out there.
Giz: So that’s why you used LED strips, right? I can’t tell from watching the video if that’s the case, but it really does look like the light is spreading out.
Ui: We definitely wanted to use LED strips. You can use base lights or lasers, but nothing compares visually to a high-powered LED strip. At the time, a relatively new technology had just come out: chip-on-board LED strips. It’s so bright you can’t look at it directly. It’s probably the closest thing to a real lightsaber blade I’ve ever seen. I have a bunch of Neopixel custom lightsabers and they’re pretty cool, but maybe they have diffusion issues or just not enough power. But brightness-wise, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
Giz: Another big challenge seems to have been the winding portion of the design. Why did you ultimately decide to use a circular winch?
Ui: Initially, I tried to wrap the LED strip around the tank’s track mechanism to save space. The problem I realized only after I started testing is that when you bend the LED strip (with PCB and silicone epoxy cover) into a shape, it creates resistance. And it tries to maintain that shape. So if you try to stretch the strip, it doesn’t stretch. Bending it into a circle creates a constant radius, so there is very little resistance when the strip comes out or retracts.
Giz: What was the diameter of the handlebars you all chose?
Ui: The thinnest part is 2 inches, with all the gribblies growing out from there.
Giz: So you can still hold it with one hand?
Ui: Well, personally, I would like to make it thinner, and that’s what I’m working on now. I thought maybe we could make it a little thinner, and Acolyteand I thought, wow, that pattern is big. I could thin it out a little bit, but honestly, I think it’s in pretty good shape right now.
Giz: It reminds me of that. I don’t know if you had a retractable lightsaber when you were a kid, but you couldn’t hold it in your fist with your little kid’s hands. So that’s actually the first one I remember. So it’s kind of nostalgic in that sense. You mentioned that you have other lightsabers. What other lightsabers do you have?
Ui: I had a custom Saberforge blade. I also have a lightsaber from Galaxy’s Edge, which I used as a reference for our version, but it’s a little bigger than the more movie-accurate version. I have lightsabers from a company called The Pach Store, and they make some pretty good ones.
Giz: What are your plans for making the Retractable Lightsaber Mark 2?
Ui: I definitely want to make the hilt thinner, but I also want it to extend and retract faster. I plan to make the entire hilt out of metal. The big problem is that I designed it with a single LED strip, which gives it a dark saber-like effect when viewed from the side, so I would like to at least be able to rotate the whole thing and the inner assembly to create a full blade-like effect. This is a very interesting challenge.
Giz: How are you going to make that happen?
Ui: That was my intention from the beginning, so the inner chassis holds everything together in one assembly. The outer shell is really just a cosmetic piece that can slide. My original plan was to just put a motor and battery on the end and have the whole inner chassis rotate. I was worried that as it rotated it would also cut out the LED strips on the magician’s wand, but that didn’t happen in testing. As long as you don’t spin it above a certain speed, it’s fine.
Giz: How is it so far?
Ui: It looks great, but the buttons now spin at about 1,200 RPM, making it hard to control. The motion sensor with sound effects is just crazy, like “what’s going on? why is it spinning so much?” I think a good way to deal with this would be to switch to a Bluetooth control system and use an additional module to move the buttons there. For the motion sensor, I’ll be contacting the board manufacturer who helped me develop the first version. I’ve had a lot of comments suggesting putting in a diffusion layer, but I think this is the closest to the blade look. I’m worried that adding another layer would ruin the blade look.
Giz: Think of it as a blade made of plasma, and it would be pretty hard to see.
Ui: It should be very bright.
