The good folks at Adafruit made a revision to the feather wing light saber. based on their PropMaker RP2040.
The original:
The Lightsaber Prop-Maker RP2040 is much smaller and fits better in the hands.
The single feather requires a lot less room than the stacked feather and prop maker feather wing. I was able to re-use the blade and neopixel strip from the first build. So I only had to get the prop maker rp2040 and the speaker.
So our Cricut Maker hit the same rubber roller problem that everyone else who seems to own one of these hits eventually. If you google around for it you can see how often this occurs. Basically the material the rollers are made of deteriorates and starts to come out of the slots etched in the roller and gets pinched in the casing. It also will prevent the cutter mat from feeding correctly.
New rollers are easy enough to acquire. You can 3d print them in TPU or buy them from Amazon. Installing them is the tricky part. There are a bunch of Youtube videos on how to do it so I won't write my own. The trick is the first set of screws. There is a plate on the hinge of the cover plate that needs to be pried off so you can remove the screws. The issue is it seems they glue this piece in place now, making it all-but impossible to service this machine.
I was able to pry it off enough to get the screws out but there are now hairline cracks in the bracket. I used super glue to add some amount of strength to the cracked surface and am hoping for the best. The unit does cut now correctly so that part was a success.
It's really unfortunate that the Cricut company has made these units so unserviceable. They could have done a lot to make the device repairable. The closed software ecosystem is also a major drawback to this device. I think if I had the purchase to do all over again I'd probably go with a Brother unit or some other non-closed system.
