Freeform Shuttle Tydirium
Iconic Lambda-class Star Wars shuttle recreated with bent conductors and ATtiny85 LED lighting.
Toward the middle of Return of the Jedi, you see the Lambda-class shuttle Tydirium approaching Endor with various Rebel Alliance characters surreptitiously onboard. It’s an interesting craft, with prominently blinking lights that are presumably there to help other spaceships avoid it.
Fascinated by this fictional craft, Paul Gallagher decided to recreate it as a freeform circuitry project. It features a hand-bent outline of the shuttle itself, along with with five blinking LEDs and two that stay on at all times. The sculpture runs off of a 3V coin-cell battery, and while it would have been possible to use a 555 timer to blink the lights, it instead employs an ATtiny85 MCU programmed with an extremely simple “blink” sketch. Only one GPIO pin is used to control the five blinking LEDs through 100 ohm resistors.
Blink timing was replicated based on analysis of the movie. This works out to be a total cycle time of 1.7 seconds, with the lights staying on for 0.2 seconds each cycle.
According to Gallagher, the pattern is sometimes broken when the scene cuts away, which he attributes to “20th century editing quirks.” Maybe that explains this inconsistency, but not the bigger question though is how does an advanced space empire get away with using expired passwords?