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There are many ways to light up an R2 dome, and I’d like to try and summarise them here. This won’t be a totally exhaustive list, and there is always the fully DIY option. Of course, massive disclaimer for the fact that I produce the Astropixels, however I will try to stick to the facts and let you come up with your own opinions.

What lights do I need?

For a typical R2 dome you have the logics, PSIs, and Holoprojectors (HPs). Some kits come with all of these in one, whilst others can be put together from different sources.

	Logics	PSI	HP	Notes
Teecees	Yes	Yes	Optional
R-Series	Yes	No	No
AstroPixels	Yes	Yes	Yes
FlthyMcNasty	No	No	Yes
PSI Pro	No	Yes	No
ReonHP	No	No	Yes
CuriousMarc HP	No	No	Yes

I won’t cover all the options here, just the top four as they are the ones I’ve had the most personal experience with.

Teecees

The Teecees are the OG lighting system for club droids (the screen droids were fibre optics and a colour wheel) and have been used for a long time. These are from a time before we had the awesome technology of addressable RGB LEDs like the neopixels. They have a certain charm to them, however you are stuck with the colour of the LEDs that you have soldered in. The main benefit these days for them is the fact that you can order the PCBs for very cheap, source the components, and build them yourself.

It can be tricky to find the flangeless LEDs, and also the chips needed for them are getting harder to find. You can plug some HP boards into them and some people supply them along with the rest of the kit.

R-Series

In my opinion, the R-Series are the top of the line for looks. These came about when the addressable LEDs became more common, and played on the fact that the 5mm size was too big for the logic displays. This meant that a system of fibre optics cables had to be used to fit all the lights into the small area of the displays. The fibre optic look actually replicated the original trilogy look of a bundle of cables and a colour wheel. Especially with the fading of the colours from one to another.

It did mean that these were quite expensive and could be ‘fun’ to put together. Later versions made the assembly much easier. They also only consisted of the logics, so you had to source at least the PSIs separately. The HPs aren’t really necessary, but they would also need to be sourced.

Paul, who makes these, will also donate some of the proceeds to the Grant Imahara Foundation.

Astropixels

Again, I will try to be impartial. The Astropixels came about when tiny 2mm addressable LEDs became available. This meant a simple board with surface mounted LEDs could fit enough in to recreate the logics with no need for fibre optics. Coupled with the work done in the code for the R-Series (and others) being incorporated into one easy to use arduino library, ReelTwo.

Thanks to the ReelTwo library, it was also easy to create PSIs, and HPs (using the FlthyMcNasty system) and run everything off a single ESP32 and still have room for expansion.

Also helping the development was the rise in services by fabrication houses in China that allowed the whole boards to be manufactured and shipped so no surface mount soldering was required, coupled with the power of bulk purchasing, this meant that I could get a large amount of boards made and reduce the cost of a kit down to as little as possible with £10 from every set going to charity.

Of course, the main problem is that I’m (currently) the only supplier and the price point is only attainable if a large batch is ordered at once (around 50-100 sets). That being said, the ReelTwo library is open source and the boards are just simple strings of addressable LEDs, so quite easy to design.

The can be purchased here: https://we-make-things.co.uk/product/astropixels/

FlthyMcNasty HP

This is one that came about using mainly off the shelf components, with just a custom PCB to act as the ‘motherboard’. An Adafruit PWM servo board, and arduino, and some Adafruit neopixel boards meant you could easily put a kit together for an amazingly low price. It could even drive the HP servos if you have them installed, giving another level of life to your droid.

The code written for these was incorporated into the ReelTwo library, which means it was easy to integrate into the Astropixels, so there is no real difference in how the HPs act.

Summary

Hopefully this has been an impartial overview of the various light systems. Sorry if I missed any out.