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.