LEDSaber

Much wow, much UCR
swooosh! (or just swo i guess)
meow
cat
wow website
watch (doesn't work but wouldve been cool)

Inspiration

Hologram fans and lightsabers

What it does

A glowing sword that changes colors on different parts of it as you swing it. Also a website that allows you to upload a picture, put in some text, or have an AI (hosted on my poor computer) make a picture to put on the LEDSaber.

How we built it

Blood, sweat, and tears (and some arduino parts like a nano, mpu6050, and some LED).

Challenges we ran into

The arduino has like 2k bytes of memory, so can store only around 1000 integers, and we're here trying to fit an entire image onto it to display.

Software is hard. Hardware is also hard. When you put them together, you don't even know what the problem is anymore.

My computer blue screened twice in a row, booted into BIOS, failed to exit BIOS, crashed, and corrupted something. Took a few hours to get it back into a somewhat working state, but file explorer now hangs. I feel bad for my computer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I didn't really think I could coordinate the LED's well enough to form coherent pictures, but it actually works.

What we learned

How to use an arduino. How to make a python backend. How to make a frontend. Software and hardware are both hard. Really, was a first (or second) for me in many areas. How to save space. How to cheat space. How to space space. Space has no air, which is why you can't hear people talk. But light still works.