Celebrate Star Wars Days with Some of Its Best Tech

May 7, 2024

Use the force to gain insight into some of the exciting and festive projects that fans have made to celebrate the Star Wars holidays.

Cabe Atwell

Related To: Electronic Design

The Volumetric Display is a complex build that takes advantage of repurposed technology.

Star Wars-Inspired DIY Volumetric Display

While it may not be the 3D holographic displays used in the Star Wars universe, this DIY Volumetric Display is still impressive. Created by Maker Mac70, the display is more like a 3D printer for images that displays slices of a model onto planar surfaces. The build uses a modified LCD projector, a mirror, and a DLP-based machine outfitted with an RGB color wheel to project images upward onto a surface.

The display screen is the star of the show, as Mac employed a pair of 3D-printed mechanisms and voice coils from old speakers to move a translucent screen vertically. That motion, when driven at a frequency of 30 Hz, allows for 12 separate layers to be displayed across the screen, providing the image with the illusion of depth. Mac also spent a considerable amount of time creating the toolchain to slice STL models into images and then map them in layers. The Volumetric Display manages to capture the essence of the technology used in Star Wars.

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What was better than celebrating May the Fourth? Revenge of the Fifth! For those that missed both, there’s still an opportunity to celebrate all things Star Wars through the eyes of the engineers and makers who got the opportunity to have their projects cast into the spotlight. From lightsabers to droids, these projects manage to capture the essence of a galaxy far, far away, with imaginative and creative skills to bring some of that technology home to this planet for all to enjoy.

It’s also essential to reflect on why May the Fourth and Revenge of the Fifth became unofficial holidays. The love of a science-fiction universe and the characters that inhabit it have brought millions together over the decades. Both young and old have taken inspiration from that galaxy far, far away to create incredible projects that defy boundaries and allow others to experience the joy and the magic that went into their creation. That is the power of Star Wars.

With that said, we included 10 entries for this year’s celebration in 2024, each ranging in different complexities and difficulties but still retaining what makes the Star Wars universe so unique:

About the Author

Cabe Atwell | Technology Editor, Electronic Design

Cabe is a Technology Editor for Electronic Design.

Engineer, Machinist, Maker, Writer. A graduate Electrical Engineer actively plying his expertise in the industry and at his company, Gunhead. When not designing/building, he creates a steady torrent of projects and content in the media world. Many of his projects and articles are online at element14 & SolidSmack, industry-focused work at EETimes & EDN, and offbeat articles at Make Magazine. Currently, you can find him hosting webinars and contributing to Electronic Design and Machine Design.

Cabe is an electrical engineer, design consultant and author with 25 years’ experience. His most recent book is “Essential 555 IC: Design, Configure, and Create Clever Circuits”

Cabe writes the Engineering on Friday blog on Electronic Design.