New member and first post so be nice. ;-)
My wife and I are working on NCR Ranger costumes for our sons for 2016 FanimeCon. I will post up a WIP on the entire costume later but I thought I would start with the eye-lights since I haven't seen anything like my design anywhere yet.
First you have to design your eye-frames. Mine are built for our hand-moulded mask so won't fit anyone else's so you will have to create this yourself in Fusion360 or OnShape or whatever you know how to use or want to learn. Make the frame 10-15mm wide, 3mm thick and the inside of it 3mm smaller than the inside of your eye holes of your mask. Once that shape is right, bevel the inside edge at 45 degrees. It should look like this:
Then export that and 3Dprint it using Transparent Red PLA filament.
Then comes the real fun, buy a bunch of Red surface-mount LEDs. I used 0603s but you could definitely go bigger, which would make the soldering a heck of a lot easier. I used 11 per eye.
This was after the first round of soldering, by the end I was soldering one wire straight off the end of the LED and the other would have a 90-degree bend and be soldered so that it came down parallel to the first wire. WARNING: Trying to bend the wires after you soldered them onto the LED will almost guarantee a failed LED. Bend first, solder second.
Stick the LEDs "evenly" around the frame using metallic tape.
Then wrap the rest of the frame (other than the beveled edge) with metallic tape. Add a layer of electrical tape to the back of the frame completely covering the metallic tape. Then apply two rings of self-adhesive copper tape to the electrical tape and solder all your LED leads to the copper tape, positive leads to one ring, negative leads to the other.
Quick test of the soldered up frame. (DON'T test without the proper resistor. These LEDs make the cutest little POP noises when they die.)
To calculate the resistor size you need I used this http://ledcalc.com/#calc and because I didn't have any resistors that small, I used this http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-paralresist.htm to calculate what exactly I needed.
Testing the frame behind the Mirrored Red Mylar
We discovered that there was a lot of glare into the mask so we added some more metallic tape bent at 90-degrees so that it stuck to the back of the frame and went through the eye-opening and just touched the mylar. Now there is no glare at all inside the mask.
One of the lucky boys modeling the final product.
My wife and I are working on NCR Ranger costumes for our sons for 2016 FanimeCon. I will post up a WIP on the entire costume later but I thought I would start with the eye-lights since I haven't seen anything like my design anywhere yet.
First you have to design your eye-frames. Mine are built for our hand-moulded mask so won't fit anyone else's so you will have to create this yourself in Fusion360 or OnShape or whatever you know how to use or want to learn. Make the frame 10-15mm wide, 3mm thick and the inside of it 3mm smaller than the inside of your eye holes of your mask. Once that shape is right, bevel the inside edge at 45 degrees. It should look like this:
Then export that and 3Dprint it using Transparent Red PLA filament.
Then comes the real fun, buy a bunch of Red surface-mount LEDs. I used 0603s but you could definitely go bigger, which would make the soldering a heck of a lot easier. I used 11 per eye.
This was after the first round of soldering, by the end I was soldering one wire straight off the end of the LED and the other would have a 90-degree bend and be soldered so that it came down parallel to the first wire. WARNING: Trying to bend the wires after you soldered them onto the LED will almost guarantee a failed LED. Bend first, solder second.
Stick the LEDs "evenly" around the frame using metallic tape.
Then wrap the rest of the frame (other than the beveled edge) with metallic tape. Add a layer of electrical tape to the back of the frame completely covering the metallic tape. Then apply two rings of self-adhesive copper tape to the electrical tape and solder all your LED leads to the copper tape, positive leads to one ring, negative leads to the other.
Quick test of the soldered up frame. (DON'T test without the proper resistor. These LEDs make the cutest little POP noises when they die.)
To calculate the resistor size you need I used this http://ledcalc.com/#calc and because I didn't have any resistors that small, I used this http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-paralresist.htm to calculate what exactly I needed.
Testing the frame behind the Mirrored Red Mylar
We discovered that there was a lot of glare into the mask so we added some more metallic tape bent at 90-degrees so that it stuck to the back of the frame and went through the eye-opening and just touched the mylar. Now there is no glare at all inside the mask.
One of the lucky boys modeling the final product.
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