Finaly....something worth posting

First, a real quick update on my lightsaber.
Here it is freshly painted. The black part is what was painted; the blue part is painter's tape to protect the chrome.

Now to what we're all here for. I have recently thought up a brilliant idea on how to design my droid's Logic Displays. Traditionally, most builders use 1 LED for each point of light in the displays. However, this requires 24v of battery power. The batteries typically used for our droids are big and heavy. The more voltage, the bigger and heavier the battery. For this reason, I've been trying to keep my power requirements down to only 12v, but the logic displays have until now been a problem. The front display has 90 points of light or 32 blue, 54 white, and 4 aqua. Using a QK169 PIC Flasher Kit (an assembling required LED blinking circuit), 8 strings of these lights are assembled in patterns so the blinking looks somewhat random. Now here is where my idea differs: instead of using 1 LED per point of light, use 1 LED of each color for each string of lights using fiber optic strands to multiply one LED into however many is needed of that color for that string. Check out this drawing I made for an example of what I'm rambling about:I apologize if I left you feeling a little dizzy from this explanation. So to simplify, I'll be making more drawings demonstrating this new concept of mine and, hopefully soon, I'll have prototypes to make videos of.

John