So my son is 6yo, big Spiderman fan but has started to show a lot of interest in Iron Man / Tony Stark. Specifically, he wanted an "iron man shirt", and I knew exactly what he was after. Not shooting for "screen accuracy" here, but something that people will see through a shirt and go "oh yeah, that's an arc reactor".
Plan is to mount the unit in a pocket sewn into the shirt, removable for washing and charging the internal battery via USB.
Settled on a 24 LED RGB ring, and a 7 LED RGB. The design above are the 3D printed parts, sans components.
And here are all the components laid out before assembly.
First part to be mounted in the base is the LIPO charging board. Happy to say it snapped right into place. Normally these ship with a JST connector to connect the battery, but it had to go due to space constraints.
Battery wired right to the pads on the charger. As you can devine from the space on the base, I intended to use a larger capacity battery, but the old 1250mah unit I had lost it's pad when I went to desolder the existing wires. So this was inside another prop of mine, it will have to do.
The heart of this is an Adafruit FLORA board, seen above wired in to power. A slide switch serves as a disconnect when the unit is charging via USB as the onboard "battery on/off" switch will be inaccesible as it's inside the unit. The slide switch also serves as the master "on/off" switch.
The two LED modules mounted on their guides. No one will ever see them being inside, but I couldn't help painting them a nice racecar red. Hey it's an Iron Man prop right?
All wired up and ready to go internally. The USB port on the FLORA is still accessible in case any last minute code changes need to be pushed to the board, say to tweak brightness settings before sealing everything up.
The shell I printed to cover everything and mask out the "arc reactor" pattern fits nicely, but there needs to be more standoff distance between the LEDs and it for diffusion purposes. So I'm reprinting it with an extra few mm of height.
More to follow!
Plan is to mount the unit in a pocket sewn into the shirt, removable for washing and charging the internal battery via USB.
Settled on a 24 LED RGB ring, and a 7 LED RGB. The design above are the 3D printed parts, sans components.
And here are all the components laid out before assembly.
First part to be mounted in the base is the LIPO charging board. Happy to say it snapped right into place. Normally these ship with a JST connector to connect the battery, but it had to go due to space constraints.
Battery wired right to the pads on the charger. As you can devine from the space on the base, I intended to use a larger capacity battery, but the old 1250mah unit I had lost it's pad when I went to desolder the existing wires. So this was inside another prop of mine, it will have to do.
The heart of this is an Adafruit FLORA board, seen above wired in to power. A slide switch serves as a disconnect when the unit is charging via USB as the onboard "battery on/off" switch will be inaccesible as it's inside the unit. The slide switch also serves as the master "on/off" switch.
The two LED modules mounted on their guides. No one will ever see them being inside, but I couldn't help painting them a nice racecar red. Hey it's an Iron Man prop right?
All wired up and ready to go internally. The USB port on the FLORA is still accessible in case any last minute code changes need to be pushed to the board, say to tweak brightness settings before sealing everything up.
The shell I printed to cover everything and mask out the "arc reactor" pattern fits nicely, but there needs to be more standoff distance between the LEDs and it for diffusion purposes. So I'm reprinting it with an extra few mm of height.
More to follow!
