I just wanted to post a thread to share two arc reactor builds I have worked on in the past week or two. Neither of them are accurate in details or size. I built them with my own interpretation as well as available materials and time in mind.
My design is composed of two major components:
1) Support Plate
2) Visual Plate
The support plate is aluminum in my case and I use it to mount the center LED on as well as running elastic band through so I can wear the arc.
The visual plate is a 1/2" thick acrylic plate that has all of the cosmetic pieces attached. The acrylic is sanded down to diffuse the light. It also has small 5mm LEDs around the perimeters. The outer edge cosmetic pieces are cut from a length of 1/2" aluminum channel.
The support plate and visual plates are connected with three bolts and nuts.
To wear the arc I have a T-shirt with a hole cut in the center. The hole allows the visual plate to be revealed, but the support plate remains underneath the shirt.
The cool thing I learned about using acrylic for the visual plate is that you can get some interesting optical properties by machining it. To get the whole thing to "glow" nearly uniformly (even though I am injecting light only at specific points with the LEDs) I used a drill press to roughen where the LED will shine light into. This roughed surface disperses the light throughout the whole acrylic sheet and gives the desired effect:
As far as electronics goes, the center LED in both cases are Luxeon III Stars (white) and the peripheral LEDs are regular 5mm white from Ebay. They are all wired in parallel (connect all negatives together, connect all positives together, connect the common positive and common negative to battery terminals). It is run of a 4.5V battery source. The battery pack is a 4AAA holder from Radioshack and I soldered a wire in one of the battery spots (to make it a 3-AAA holder).
My design is composed of two major components:
1) Support Plate
2) Visual Plate
The support plate is aluminum in my case and I use it to mount the center LED on as well as running elastic band through so I can wear the arc.
The visual plate is a 1/2" thick acrylic plate that has all of the cosmetic pieces attached. The acrylic is sanded down to diffuse the light. It also has small 5mm LEDs around the perimeters. The outer edge cosmetic pieces are cut from a length of 1/2" aluminum channel.
The support plate and visual plates are connected with three bolts and nuts.
To wear the arc I have a T-shirt with a hole cut in the center. The hole allows the visual plate to be revealed, but the support plate remains underneath the shirt.
The cool thing I learned about using acrylic for the visual plate is that you can get some interesting optical properties by machining it. To get the whole thing to "glow" nearly uniformly (even though I am injecting light only at specific points with the LEDs) I used a drill press to roughen where the LED will shine light into. This roughed surface disperses the light throughout the whole acrylic sheet and gives the desired effect:
As far as electronics goes, the center LED in both cases are Luxeon III Stars (white) and the peripheral LEDs are regular 5mm white from Ebay. They are all wired in parallel (connect all negatives together, connect all positives together, connect the common positive and common negative to battery terminals). It is run of a 4.5V battery source. The battery pack is a 4AAA holder from Radioshack and I soldered a wire in one of the battery spots (to make it a 3-AAA holder).
