The Martian Space Suit

Will you make a version without the black borders and extend the circuit pattern a bit?

I have to say, it's looking great!



That looks awesome! Are you planning on printing it with the thick parts in raised ink like the original?

Thanks guys. This is just going to be a direct print to fabric design, so no texture, but I'm brainstorming ways to add a raised texture. Certainly it would have to be a double pass process utilizing two very different techniques, but the design itself can serve as a placement guide until I get that figured out.

Yeah, I can make a version without the black borders and extend the design Andreas. No problem. :thumbsup
 
I was flicking through the film looking for some reference shots for the wrist computer and I realised one of the screen grabs showed the LED strips inside the helmet.

image.png

A little googling later and I've found this LED strip which seems to have the same repeating pattern of orange solder points, LED, LED, black resistor, LED.

image.jpeg

Found a UK supplier here https://www.led-supplies.com/led-st...2/led-strip-lighting-low-cost-economy-series/
 
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Some complete novice stuff here :D Making the visor mold atm. Decided to make the mold through 123D Design to 123D Make, stacked slices printed to A3 and then cut with a pencil knife from 3mm cardboard, stacked together with a little bit of paper glue, cut some horrible parts out, one tube of wood filler, sand, another tube of wood filler now drying..

Will sand one more time and have 2 options atm. Either I will sand once, add one more tube of wood filler and sand that, or I will sand this, then put a layer of tape to smooth it some more and then add one more wood filler tube and sand it out. What do you think? which one would work best?

I'm not sure how I will do the flanges, they wouldnt be possible to do by vacuum forming since they go negative, I might cheat and glue some on. Blow forming seems so hard to get right. I will form 2 hemispheres with this mold and then the bottom part I will cut to the the size that it should be. One idea is to just raise the current mold a bit and vacuum form the flanges a bit deeper, then with a heatgun, form them to fit the lower part of the helmet..

Got myself some White ABS filament to print some stuff now, haven't had any time to do it tho.
edit: I have some 3mm acrylic and 1.5mm PETG, couldn't find any thicker PETG in this timetable, so I will see which one will work the best. the 1.5mm PETG might thin a little too much but I'll see.

P.s. Can you find my plate/mug from the first picture ;)
 
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Matching the LED strip is a bit nit picky, any lights that fit would do.

Agreed! Although there are a hell of a lot of lights in that helmet and so working out what wattage they are allows me to be happy that the relay board I'm hooking up to the the Pi can safely turn them on and off.

Tuskajussi Do the flanges really go negative? I thought that they did originally but decided that it was just a trick of the eye because the visor is at an angle to the rest of the helmet.
 
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The visor flanges do indeed go negative, it is most likely that the movie production used blow molding to form this part, not really possible for a garage modeler.

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Some complete novice stuff here :D Making the visor mold atm. Decided to make the mold through 123D Design to 123D Make, stacked slices printed to A3 and then cut with a pencil knife from 3mm cardboard, stacked together with a little bit of paper glue, cut some horrible parts out, one tube of wood filler, sand, another tube of wood filler now drying..

Will sand one more time and have 2 options atm. Either I will sand once, add one more tube of wood filler and sand that, or I will sand this, then put a layer of tape to smooth it some more and then add one more wood filler tube and sand it out. What do you think? which one would work best?

I'm not sure how I will do the flanges, they wouldnt be possible to do by vacuum forming since they go negative, I might cheat and glue some on. Blow forming seems so hard to get right. I will form 2 hemispheres with this mold and then the bottom part I will cut to the the size that it should be. One idea is to just raise the current mold a bit and vacuum form the flanges a bit deeper, then with a heatgun, form them to fit the lower part of the helmet..

Got myself some White ABS filament to print some stuff now, haven't had any time to do it tho.
edit: I have some 3mm acrylic and 1.5mm PETG, couldn't find any thicker PETG in this timetable, so I will see which one will work the best. the 1.5mm PETG might thin a little too much but I'll see.

P.s. Can you find my plate/mug from the first picture ;)
Very nice,you are going old school on this thing.
 
I managed to make a bit of progress over the weekend. The new relay board is now hooked up in place of the temporary LEDs and 3 temperature probes are now also connected.

Relays and temp sensors.JPG

Added a few more graphics and animations to the UI and got the code working to read the temperature probes. The values currently update automatically every 5 seconds.There is one small problem, sometimes a short delay occurs when toggling one of the buttons that controls the relays but I think this is due to the sensor refresh getting in the way because it's currently not asynchronous. I don't have my iPhone 5 with me so I took a screen recording of the UI on my laptop instead.


The first few seconds just show the animations, then I toggle the 4 relays followed by holding the probe linked to environment temp. in my hand so you can see the displayed temp rising.

I'm wondering what to do next, I've got various ideas for other sensors that could be attached, but I'm thinking I might be best to take all the hard coded settings and move them out into a settings screen. If you've got any ideas for features then let me know!
 
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Some complete novice stuff here :D Making the visor mold atm. Decided to make the mold through 123D Design to 123D Make, stacked slices printed to A3 and then cut with a pencil knife from 3mm cardboard, stacked together with a little bit of paper glue, cut some horrible parts out, one tube of wood filler, sand, another tube of wood filler now drying..
Forgive me if I haven't been paying close enough attention, but did you make the 3D pattern yourself? Or download it somewhere?
And great job! The mold looks pretty fantastic. Would love to learn to do that.
 
I'm wondering what to do next, I've got various ideas for other sensors that could be attached, but I'm thinking I might be best to take all the hard coded settings and move them out into a settings screen. If you've got any ideas for features then let me know!

I rented this a few weeks ago, but only watched it last night. Therefore, my suggestions are not so much canonical as ... "suggested by:"

Remote pressurize / depressurize animation sequence: for the hab airlock and the rover. We see these on displays inside the airlocks, I think, but not on the suit computer. Still, I think it would fit the theme, and add a 'play feature.'

Low oxygen alarm animation?

Low suit pressure alarm animation?

Elapsed mission time / Sol & local Mars time clock display?


-MJ
 
Forgive me if I haven't been paying close enough attention, but did you make the 3D pattern yourself? Or download it somewhere?
And great job! The mold looks pretty fantastic. Would love to learn to do that.

Nothing fancy there, actually I just created a hemisphere in 123D Design with the dimensions I got from Captain Aprils post a while back. You can then import that and create a "stackable cardboard model" of that in 123D Make (they are both free programs) then print etc. The mold is starting to look a lot better now, got 2 layers on it and will try to find some time today to do a test run with it. Hopefully I dont find any big problems with it. I will need to settle with some lower quality stuff though, since the Oscars-watching party is next weekend :D
 
I rented this a few weeks ago, but only watched it last night. Therefore, my suggestions are not so much canonical as ... "suggested by:"

Remote pressurize / depressurize animation sequence: for the hab airlock and the rover. We see these on displays inside the airlocks, I think, but not on the suit computer. Still, I think it would fit the theme, and add a 'play feature.'

Low oxygen alarm animation?

Low suit pressure alarm animation?

Elapsed mission time / Sol & local Mars time clock display?


-MJ
Although there isn't a shot in the movie of the wrist computer when the airlock re-pressurises, there is an example in a screen from the company who did all the design for the movie so I could use that as a reference and it would be pretty simple.

There are actually only a handful of times you get a good view of the wrist computer in the movie but one of them is when Watney comes around after his suit is punctured and he's left on mars. It shows a low oxygen and suit pressure alarm. Again pretty simple to implement.

I had thought about having a mars/earth clock but had been scratching my head trying to understand the math of calculating mars dates and time. Seems there isn't one single answer. But I have just found a really good explanation so I'll give it a good read. I would need to hook an RTC (real time clock) module to the Pi as they don't have one built in so lose the time if they are switched off and don't have an internet connection to get the time from.

I've got a whole raft of other possible ideas:
  • I was thinking the circling orange dot would be cool if it pointed to the Hab. Obviously that isn't possible but it could be simulated by using a compass module to make it point to north instead.
  • I'd like to have a pulse sensor hooked up and there are 3 possible options. An ear clip is the cheapest and can be worn under the snoopy cap but but I'm not sure how well they work. You can get an ECG module reasonably cheaply and get pulse from that but it means running wires into the suit and having sticky pads like they use in hospitals. Or the really pro method is to use a wireless chest strap like those used by athletes but they are expensive. I'm probably going to get an ear clip for now and see how it performs.
  • A barometric pressure sensor would give altitude.
  • A battery monitor which can display the battery status and alarm on low battery. A voltage module hooked up to the battery can do this easily.
  • Random alarms such as a storm warning, team member signal lost, etc,

I'm wondering if anyone else would be interested in having one? Either the software and a parts list/wiring diagram or as a semi-built kit.
 
I wouldn't suggest keeping actual Martian time :) I know a 'day' on Mars isn't 24 hours, which is why they call them 'sols' instead. I'd instead simply show the local time, perhaps in 24 hour format, and a possibly arbitrary "Sol 31" or whatever. You could count from a fixed calendar date to calculate your elapsed mission time, such as the release date of the film (Oct. 2). Or you could use the day of the month as your "Sol."

Barometric pressure and compass would be clever.

You could display ambient air temperature.

You could add an accelerometer to display G forces. Don't think that was shown in the film, but they do say Watney pulled 12 G's blasting off. Conversely, almost all the time it would display next to zero G's, unless you want to rig it to show a phony animated count.
 
Good idea! I was over complicating it maybe.

The ambient air temp is already implemented. The 3 temperatures displayed are all taken from sensors attached to the Pi and update every 5 seconds.

i did consider a 3-axis accelerometer module but like you said, it probably won't display much. And during the 12G assent he wears an Ares 4 EVA suit rather than the surface suit.
 
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Allright, my first ever vacuum forming pulls have been done.. 2 totally failed because of unknown plastic and cracking(not enough heat and my frame wasnt up to the task. I suspect the IKEA frame had 1mm acrylic) first PETG pull I did with the actual plastic I'm going to use was OK'ish (remember I have to have the suit on sunday evening :D) Sadly I miscalculated the amount of plastic I was using and I bought too little of PETG to do 2 pulls, I have 3mm acrylic as well, and I will have to be successfull with that too to make this work..

Pics! Theres some folding of the 1mm PETG on it, it thinned a lot too close to where it folded, nothing a little duct tape cant fix ;) also half of it is getting a spray of copper paint on the inside so that masks some of it as well. Where its as planned its actually quite sturdy.
 

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