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hpr_transcripts/hpr3886.txt

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+Episode: 3886
+Title: HPR3886: light saber zzz ohh no!
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3886/hpr3886.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-25 07:27:09
+
+---
+
+This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3886 from Monday the 26th of June 2023.
+Today's show is entitled, Light Sabers Easy-Zo No.
+It is hosted by Operator and is about 21 minutes long.
+It carries a clean flag.
+The summary is I talk about my problem with light sabers.
+Hello everyone, welcome to the episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
+In continuing with doing things on the oldest to newest, I'm skipping quick tips, but I'm
+starting from the oldest stuff to the newest, because the longer time goes by, the less
+I remember and the less interest I have in doing a podcast for it, so this latest one
+is about light sabers and custom light sabers.
+If you're ever into Star Wars stuff, you'll probably want to listen to this, and if you haven't
+been obsessed with light sabers, you will by the time this show is over.
+So barrier to entry, you need at least 70 bucks for a decent RGB, I'll explain everything
+later, but you want to start at least $70, 60, as in the low end, $70 for a decent RGB
+and beginner entry level, like RGB one.
+Once you start getting into the full LED all the way up, and customizable, like neopixel
+stuff, you can start getting into like 250, 280 range, and probably even more post-COVID.
+So I'll give you some numbers around that here in a bit.
+So it kind of started back when my son didn't give us getting older.
+We started to, yeah, some weird discount garbage and pop-ups, okay, two pop-ups.
+So we had a light saber, and I had a light saber that was original Star Wars FX light sabers.
+They're still to this day like $99, they were $99, 15 years ago.
+The one I have still worked with the card died on it.
+I swapped out the speaker, and it still sounds like cooked bacon.
+So the soundboard is like gotten cooked on it somehow, probably just because it's old.
+But I will say that it is a workhorse, and it's worth every penny I paid for it.
+So that's what started me looking for other light sabers, or maybe I was at a conference
+or something and saw someone with a fancy light saber, or maybe, I don't know, at some
+point in time I saw one of these light sabers.
+And first I went looking around, and I had seen them, and there are some like more commercial
+branded ones that were, I don't remember even the names of them.
+There's probably hundreds of companies that sell light sabers.
+So I started looking at them, and I was looking at some expensive ones, and I was like,
+I never really pulled the trigger on the cool ones to customize.
+And finally, it's probably pretty COVID.
+I bought both the bullet and bought one of these, still the same price, $250.
+When I bought it, it was around $280, $268.
+And it has a Profi board, now everything now looks like it's, you know, is RGB probably.
+I have no idea.
+So we smooth swing, SD card.
+I don't even know what goal and harvest is, they've already changed everything.
+So as a $250, I'm assuming all these boards are programmable, here's the 307, Profi
+version 2, with smooth swing tier 4.
+So you can pay $307 for one, or $145 for like, that's just for the, for the blade.
+I think the blade is not part of the, part of the thing, we'll get into the pricing in
+a second.
+Anyways, it's, there's, first level is like, you're 60, whatever $60 blades, you can
+get from all the express, and there's two shops.
+There's one that's called like Saber Shop, and there's one that's called like, Saber
+Dash Shop, or like Sabers or something, to tell the difference, I will tell you a second.
+All the express.
+This is where you can buy like an entry level, all the express is where you can buy like
+an entry level, cheap one for your kids or whatever.
+Let's see, actually, look at my history.
+So the cool thing about these is you can program them, you can download like pre-existing
+boards.
+You can actually make a little bit of money if you're into sound and sound design stuff.
+I don't know where my vlog in this.
+You can get into pretty cool stuff, like a Saber Shop or Saber, I'll never find it.
+There's only a couple of good ones out there for, as far as shops go, see if I can find
+it.
+Yeah, a great game Saber store, I don't know.
+You'd probably just look on Reddit, it's probably actually changed since the two years
+ago, I got into this stuff.
+I will try and find, since I can't log in, I will try and find all the express log in
+here.
+So you can get an RGB one that's just all big, bright-ass, like at the bottom of your
+light saber.
+Those are, like I said, anywhere from like 70 and up for those, as far as like just straight
+up, whatever.
+Now what you don't want to do is buy a non-dueling blade.
+There's no point in buying a non-dueling blade unless you're going to put it on the shelf.
+So first things first, make sure that it's a quote-unquote dueling blade.
+They are a little bit more expensive, usually generally kind of sort of not.
+So let me log into my account, see if I can pull, okay, now we're in Spanish, not sure
+why, how that happened.
+But wow, okay, sight, English, here we go.
+So language, anyways, I, for whatever reason, I'm stuck in Spanish or something.
+Let me just put a stomp, LGT store, here we go.
+That's where I got my latest one.
+This other one is Jinchin store, which I think that's where I bought a really cheap one
+and I think that was the one that didn't have a dueling saber.
+But anyways, LGT store, I think is where I got my one that was decent.
+There's another one called like store LGT or LGT store, saber store, whatever.
+But if you just want to get like an entry level cheap light saber for your kit, I'll
+they express LGT, that's Lima Golf Pango store, anywhere from like 70 to up.
+But I wouldn't buy anything, I wouldn't buy any, I wouldn't buy a like a trophy board
+from them unless you knew what you were doing.
+But they have like hill parts and you can buy them in, in per, per parts.
+But at the end of the day, you end up paying the same amount of money as far as I, as
+far as I can tell, when you, when you build it, parted out yourself, you end up paying
+the same amount of money for the kit or like a free boxed one.
+So my first purchase was Dark Wolf Sabers.
+It was a, it was like it was a trophy, the trophy won, let's see, we'll log in.
+Sorry.
+I'm doing all this live.
+So if it's not well, whatever time, the reason it's not well, well sorted, it's because
+I'm doing it all live.
+268 shipped.
+It's a, a, a, a trophy.
+It was a PROPHY board.
+I got a PROPHY fix a little V2 smooth swing tier 3, which I think that just means a software
+if it's on them.
+I don't think that means anything, 32 inch standard blade and the blades, if you could buy
+a one from like a sabers, an actual saber shop, um, you'll get a dual linked blade
+every time.
+As far as I know.
+length which is almost too long for I'm 6 foot, it's almost too long. What you can
+do with the RGB ones is if you're going to get one for your kid and he's a
+little, order whatever size length and just cut it off. Done. You don't have to
+do anything fancy. You just order the saver and then cut it off to length. What
+you don't want is a big long saver and they can't swing it around it and they
+can't practice doing cool stuff with it. So yeah you get a 32-inch blade and
+you just cut it to a whatever size. You don't even need, you can get a hacksaw
+Home Depot, whatever. We don't need to go into that. And then a holder and
+whatever. It's just a basic black and white or just a black, a black
+quilt. I bought the little kit that comes with like a little thing so you can
+like hold it on your hip which I've never done it and I probably can't do it in
+public because you know my wife would leave me or whatever. But they have like a
+little clip. You can order an extra, what do they call it, a stand? No. We all
+have wheel and holder. Cover, cut, cover, tech wheel. Dring holder. And it's like
+a little ring and it just clips on the side and then you take the blade, unscrew
+the blade and let the blade, you know, put the blade in the same place. And then
+you hook it to your side or whatever. The blades are again the RGB one is just
+the light at the bottom, right? The full blown LEDs all the way up. So it's you
+know, I don't know how many LEDs, but you can actually programmable individually if
+you're here so inclined. But usually it's just, you know, bunch of profiles
+you come up with. But it's like a on the bottom, it's got two contacts. So it's
+got like a almost like a white or a, you ever see a battery, the battery packs
+where there's a ring on the outside and then the middle has another contact and
+the middle is like the positive and the outside is the negative or something.
+That's how the blades are. So like if you have an issue with your brake blade or
+you brake it or whatever, it's going to cause you like $90. I think blades, like an
+RGB or a non RGB blade, which is basically the LEDs strip inside of your thing.
+I think they're like 90 bucks minimum, last time I looked. So like if you mess
+up your blade, you're kind of kind of screwed. That's a lot of what you're
+paying for when you pay for the full blown kits. So but I have what number of
+children swing it around and play with it. Conor's usually okay to help them,
+you know, bellies and toes is our rule. But it has been beaten and bruised and
+battered and I'm not, I'm surprised that they all three work. Considering I buy
+one of his at off the Internet of Ali Express, they're all pretty quality. Like
+if you buy a dueling lightsaber thing, they're pretty quality and they know
+that people are going to mess with them from around. I had to fix his, I had to
+find a screw somewhere cause he had lost the screw and didn't tell me. So he
+pressed the button and it would just the button would go inside of the thing
+and fall off and whatever. So he didn't really care and sort of kind of
+worked. But but yeah, I would say, you know, start off with like an RGB one if you
+like it, you know, get a couple for your kids. But for a while I had a problem.
+I think we have four or five now total. So the only mistake I made is I bought one
+for him and it didn't have it only played and it cracked. And then I try to fix
+it and it cracked again. And then I realized, oh, I need a dueling blade. And I
+bought the dueling blade. This is just the blade part, not the, but the LED's in
+it. And that was like 40 bucks for a new blade. The whole thing only costs $70. So
+like, you know, if you buy it, make sure you buy what you actually need to know
+you want. Now a lot of these places, dark with savers, I like and Crimson Dawn
+is a pretty popular one. They both have, I know at least I'm looking at Crimson
+Dawn here. They have like these mystery box. And if they, if you're going to
+go profy, like the full bone one, you don't have a ton of money to spend and you
+want the cheapest possible way you can get in, go for one of these. And I don't
+even see any Jesus to maybe garden due to three. Crimson, you know, they don't
+have like anything. None of these are even available. They probably sell so
+quickly because it's just like a random grabback. So like, I would assume it's
+like their returns or somebody, you know, doesn't like what they ordered and they
+return it. So there's not a single one in here that's available. Wow. So I guess
+you'd have to keep an eye out for quantity one. They have based here, which
+is not what you want. Tier, tier two, Baselet. Baselet is like RGB, whatever. This
+guy is 109, which is still pretty steep for RGB. But I guess RGB or Baselet. But
+yeah, there's no, there's no grab boxes in here. 209. Is there a grab box? Looks
+like their price. Profit tier 3, 309, Jesus. That's even more than I bet. So is it
+Profit tier 2? Is that a 279? That's about what I bought. So I think the prices are pretty
+much still the same. Even though the technology is getting better. But yeah, anyways, you
+can get a mystery box saver from any of these sites that are popular. But I would say
+Reddit. Look on Reddit for a good website and then kind of establish what you want. You
+can make your own, you can build kits. They give you kits to bake one, you can go on YouTube
+and order your own. They'll tell you whatever. So once you have one, you know, one you want
+that will take custom stuff. You can start pulling down different fonts or sound fonts
+basically they call them. And lucky you, I'll put it in the show notes. I built a sound
+font for a Nyan cat or just cats in general. So it takes the, you know, RGB. It's a
+proper, a profy board, you know, pixel. And it takes the, I'll look at it later, but
+it takes the, I took like, what's your samples of cats? And I pulled down a ripped pirated
+a bunch of samples of cats from all these sample websites. And I wrote custom code to
+pull it down. That took like half a day just to do pull down all the samples. Then I had
+to take all the samples and put them in some kind of order to like be doing something.
+So like a hiss or angry or licking or miscellaneous or purring or, you know, whatever the other
+sounds are. So once I mowing, right? So I put them all in their own bucket. And then once
+I did that, I went through and picked which ones I wanted to be the lightsaber sounds.
+So there's multiple different things. Like when the lightsaber is on, that's a sound
+when you swing it. That's on. That's called a smooth, smooth swing. So when you swing
+it, it makes a different sound. So like your RGB ones will have just like a little bead.
+Like you can shake it and hear the bead rattling around. That's the cheap way to do the smooth
+swing. So when it detects, you know, the child swinging the lightsaber around, it'll make
+the wild, wild sound, right? With a smooth swing, they have like an x, y, z scale. And it'll
+tell you, you know, it knows when you're actually swinging the thing. So there's the idle and
+there's the swinging. And then there's when it hits something, a clash sound. And then
+you can hold it down. And that will be like the whole like that's like when two lightsabers
+are going at each other, the clash. I think that's called a clash. And then they're like
+a regular hit. And then they have like force powers. And then you can customize like background
+music. So you can put like a double tap and get like a background music. So I did knee
+and cat for the background music. I did the cat purring for like the idle sounds of the
+sword and different other cat purring sounds for the sword. And I'll put a video up hopefully.
+I've got to have the video somewhere up in 10 places of the lightsaber cat thing. And
+then what else you get is like I think I saw a putty cat as the four sounds. And then
+the knee and cat as a music. And I thought I was like it. That's what I did for my birthday
+like last year or year before. I spent like all day creating a sound fun. It legit was
+an entire day of work. To get it all put together all the music ripped and everything and I got
+left at. But it was fun. And if you're into that you know you can make us down font of you know
+your friends or family or you know whatever you want to do. The possibilities are endless.
+And if you get good at you can also sell them. Of course I gave my away because you know
+open source and open source priority content. That's that's the way to go. I know there's
+legality things with samples and sampling. I don't know how they're able to sell lightsabers with
+music on them. I don't know if they just don't care or maybe they probably just don't care
+enough. But there's like songs in there and sounds and samples from actual Star Wars movies and
+stuff. So I don't know if they care or maybe they just have an established relationship to where
+they're just like look if you guys are going to promote Star Wars and we're not going to go down
+that level. But yeah go ahead use our samples. We're not going to say you can use them but we're
+not also not going to see you out of existence. Because as far as I know there's legality issues with
+you know this content. Like I know there was one that had a particular song on it and then the
+next time I went to it the song was gone. So like for some reason they had pulled out the song that
+went with the lightsaber fun. So maybe you know for whatever reason somebody got their
+hisses in a tittle about one of the songs on their lightsaber and they said oh you can't
+have that and maybe it's like a season to just kind of you know DMCA pulls it pulled out there
+wherever. So that's pretty much it. It's fun to do like stop motion stuff or long exposure
+with the cameras at night. So you know when you do the if you ever done this farcola at night
+with the long exposure camera you get a tripod and then have your right your name across the
+driveway or the front flat one whatever same thing with lightsaber you could do all kinds of
+cool effects. And if I remember I will add that into a video of saver links to reddit and home
+photos of long exposure. I'm putting it all fun. It's all fun stuff. Feel like I like saver's
+people love them. We kids love them. If we go anywhere up while putting the lightsaber
+series well that's to have fun with. That's pretty much it. The software wise. Pretty straight
+forward. You put a bunch of crap on an SD card. You name it. Certain names. Now I will tell you
+that it takes a specific kind of sound. So it has to be like 16 bit PCM. It can't be 32 bit.
+It can't be MP3 and it can't be this. It has to be this link and it can only be mono. So it has
+to be like mono. 16 bit CPU. You know, it has to be a dot wave. And multiple times I put it on
+there and it wasn't working. It was either stereo or I had mixed it down properly. So it would be
+nice to have a piece of software. I'm sure there is one already that will manage like at least a
+profit board for you and say here what sounds do you want to replace? Drag and drop mini threes in
+there. Use ff impact to you know, re encode them and then boom. I'm sure that people that buy and
+sell sound files. I'm sure they use something that's not just dragging to drop in. They use probably
+some all in one you know little tool will do it. But you can program your own colors. They have
+animations. So like you have heat or I want to say flickering is a popular thing. So like if it's
+a it also looks like this this word is on fire. There's another one. It's also kind of like on fire
+we're just kind of the trickles up the up to saver. And then like I have a rainbow one that goes
+with the cat font. And then like I said the other one's like a glitching. So it'll be just like a
+just like the dark saver is that same kind of glitching aspect. I think it kind of glitches.
+But it's really cool. The sounds are really cool. And you can turn on music and you know for 10
+year, whoever. So it's definitely the thing to get out and just don't spend too much money.
+Do your research by the right thing and you know have fun.
+You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
+Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording
+podcast and click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hosting for HBR has
+been kindly provided by an onsthost.com, the internet archive and our syncs.net.
+On this otherwise stated today's show is released on their creative comments,
+attribution 4.0 international license.