It's been over a year since the last post? Well bugger.
What's the reason? Work. A job that seemed all consuming and left me with little time or energy for anything but the basics of eat, sleep, clean, exercise, and work. A job that I have since been release from. "It is what it is" is the phase I've chosen when describing the ending of that vocation. What does this mean for me, my projects, and the slow trickle of people who follow my blog? Not really sure yet, I only got let go about 2 weeks ago. I'm still trying to figure out what I do now that my former job no longer controls the lions share of my life.
So moving on. This post is about something I threatened from the beginning, but never pulled the trigger on: topics and projects other than my helmet build. Luckily, Halloween turned out to be a good vehicle for something completely different to work on. Yes, I know Halloween was the better part of a month ago. Please give me a break, I only got my free time back 2 weeks ago and well, I hadn't taken a vacation in a year. I forgot what lazying around the house felt like!
So during Halloween week I was invited to 2 Halloween parties. Halloween truly is the Makers and Hackers holiday, and I'm sure the subculture existed and thrived on the holiday far before the modern trend surrounding Make Magazine, Arduino, Makerbot, Instructables, and the like. For each party I wanted to do something with electronics (naturally) and LEDs (naturally) since everything is better when it glows in the dark (and makes everything else in the dark glow as well). These projects ended up being the "2 Hour" and the "3 Hour" Halloween costume projects mostly due to poor planning on my part.
2 Hour Halloween Costume: RGB Hands
This was definitely and exercise in "ok, what can I throw together before the party in... oh crap." Yep, that's almost exactly the words of my internal monologue 2 hours before I had to hit the road.
In the end, I threw together an Arduino (a old pre-Uno 328 I had laying around), a pair of Shiftbrites I had laying around from testing for the DPHP, a USB 5V cell phone extender battery, probably 8ft of ribbon cable, and some finicky direct soldering. Definitely one of my janky-er builds. And the arduino was WAY underused. The LEDs both cycled the same color, and it was just a rainbow hue cycle effect. Pretty boring. Definitely ran out of time to do any real or even interesting coding on this one.
The only remotely spiffy thing about it was I put the LEDs in my palms, under some cut up gloves also left over from DPHP prototyping. It made for a kind of fun way to illuminate my beer bottle and that's about it. One other trick was sticking the LED through my shirt cuff button hole, resulting in a kinda interesting cufflink.
If nothing else it as a decent flashlight, that was one dark party!
3 Hour Halloween Cosutme: Tony Stark
I decided to honor the alma mater and go as Stark for the second party
Yah, I'm sure you believe that line. Stark is the ultimate fictional playboy and what all us intelligent, nerdy engineer people wish it was like for us in the real world. Basically, this involves making your own arc reactor.
Once again, I pulled together some old prototyping parts for this job. I have some LilyPads arduino boards, which happen to be round, and some leftover rectangular white LEDs from the cheek EQs on the helmet.
My first idea was to really quickly solder the LEDs to the Lily with both the cathode and anode going to a pad each, but this wouldn't work because the lilypad is 22 pads (not including power) and so would give you an odd number of LEDs on the board (not very balanced looking). So instead I went with 10 LEDs and putting a 'ground ring' of wire jumpers for the final design. The 'housing' was a clear plastic contain lid of the right size, and the LEDs were super glued to the plastic. The Lilypad 'hovers' hanging from the positive leg of all 10 LEDs. Some long wires and a 2 AA battery pack later, and you have a really quick and dirty arc reactor.
Code was pretty simple. I put in a 'start up' series of flashes when the thing was turned on. I also put in some really simple animations with a 'fill in, drain out' and 'alternating flash' effects. Then I put all the animations on a radomizer timer so that 'most' of the time the thing was on just on, but occasionally it would 'act up'.
The costume for this ended up being incredible simple: black jeans and lightweight black 'breathing base layer' T shirt from REI I've had for ages. I'm already bearded so I didn't have to to anything there, although I am blond so not exactly Tony there. I wasn't going to dye the beard, I've heard some horror stories on that one.
'Attaching' the reactor to me was less than comfortable. To stop the soldered LED legs and board components from poking into my chest, I put a backing sheet of plastic taken from a button/pin kit. That was held in place with double stick foam tape. I had planned to use some magnets, tape, and few other ideas to hold the reactor to my shirt. But, my shirt was way too stretchy and there was no good way to support the weight without it shifting or handing at a funny angle. So I went with the 'worst case' backup in the form of super glue. I really, really don't recommend that option. My inebriation made the removal more acceptable, but it wasn't pleasant. Just don't do it, kids.
So there you have it. Two LED based Halloween projects that took less than 5 hours start to finish.
No comments:
Post a Comment