Alex Danvers (Supergirl TV)

I finished the back scabbard earlier this week. I might add a bit of silver paint to one of the parts, but it's good to go as is. It carries the sword very nicely on my back and I can pull out & sheathe quite easily with the right technique.

I worked on the blade software most evenings this week, sometimes rather late into the night. At one point, when I had the settings menu system done, the program space on the Trinket was 94% full, so I optimized the code for size and got it down to 78%. This gave me enough space to add all the display modes the settings supported, including some pretty advanced stuff. As of this morning, I have a good "1.0" version that takes 95% of the free program memory on the Trinket. The remaining 250 bytes or so should be enough to add one more display mode - the groundwork for a scrolling color animation on the blade is already there.

The last bit I did this morning was to make the settings save automatically to EEPROM on the chip, so that if I change the battery, operation is resumed with exactly the same settings as before power was lost. There's a way to reset the EEPROM to defaults, but that currently requires a USB connection to a computer.

The settings allow brightness and color selection (primary & secondary colors), single, dual and "peaking" color modes. Particle animation can be turned on and off. For dual color mode, the position of the color change is adjustable. A second menu has settings for the hilt & sheathed mode, allowing to choose between blade off, dimmed or fully on when the sword is sheathed. You also get to choose what the hilt display shows when sheathed and not sheathed. Hilt modes are: all dark, color matching the primary blade color or showing the current battery level.

I feel like I managed to cram quite a lot of functionality into less than 5kB of program memory. Good fun, bringing back memories of the 1980s... The exo suit is going to have a Pro Trinket, so memory shouldn't be as much of an issue.

I'll try to take some photos this weekend, but it's time to start working on the suit now.
 
I made a really short video clip of the blade sheathed in a mode where the animation just dims a bit when the blade is sheathed. The options are to go black, dim like this or keep full brightness. The scabbard was intentionally made from translucent & see-through materials, so that any light from inside leaks out.

[video]http://tiga.poista.net/video/BladeSheathedDimmed.mov[/video]
 
I have started 3D-modeling the armor itself. After making a few placeholder bits with simplified geometry, I knew I wanted some more reference photos/frame captures. Fortunately the suit is also used in broad daylight in the Metallo episode (2x02). Here's a 720p version on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrcggUCp_eA

The structure of the spine on the back is really clearly visible and will be invaluable when modeling that part. There are also excellent frames of the chest plate and arms.
 
Here's a Fusion 360 render of 3D modeling progress on the armor this week. The chest is entirely done with parametric modeling, so that was well within my comfort zone. The shoulder isn't complete yet, but I watched some videos on sculpting in Fusion360 and this is how far I got in about two hours tonight. The shape isn't entirely accurate yet, so I might work on that a bit more, but I think with the bolt holes etc added, what already I have now would be OK as it looks about the right size and has a good flowing shape as far as I can tell.

The spine will be a lot of fun to work on, so I'm looking forward to that. The sculpting experience on the shoulders tells me that the leg braces may turn out to be easier to model that I feared. I'll be on summer vacation soon, so I should be able to make significant progress on the model soon.

chest-shoulder00.jpeg
 
What program are you using to design your pieces?

I do all the 3D CAD modeling in Fusion 360. The reference human was generated using the "Make Human" application.

I have spent less time than expected on this project as I have been doing other stuff during the day and then ended up being tired in the evenings. I printed a shoulder piece at 50% scale to test print orientation and support material placement and found a pretty good solution for that (minimal cleanup on one edge).

First thing on Tuesday, I modeled the top piece for the back. Today, I designed the repeating spine segment, but the joints between the pieces still need to be added to the model.

Here's a render of the back as it is now. The spine segments are just in a straight line for this render. It would be nice to design some kind of spring or elastic mechanism into them, so that the spine would naturally curve into the back. The lazy version is to just have a black elastic band in the middle looping around the body.

back01.jpg
 
Was thinking the same thing about this exoskeleton a while back, that it would be a nice build. Fascinating to see someone taking it on. :D
Also, the sword --- SWEEEEEET!!!

I'm sticking to Alex' alien gun from season 2 for now. :p
Which gives me enough headaches as it is.
 
I'm still not getting all that many hours per day working on this, but I think as long as I'm making some progress every day, I should be OK... I'm spending more time outdoors than at hte computer.

I worked on the spine segments a bit further, cleaning up the base sketch to scale better and making them larger. I made some test prints to verify that the segments work well together, so now I have a couple of physical parts. They will be easy to print and they look quite nice in practice.

Since then, I have moved on to modeling the arm. The upper arm is mostly there with just wire/tube guides and some small bits missing. I'll also add some features for assembly & mounting, but that can wait until later on. I started working on the elbow joint today, but didn't get very far. The render screenshot shows how far I have progressed.

All of this is taking quite a bit of time as I'm trying to figure out the 3D layout using my reference photos. The finned parts on the arms might be some sort of gun rails. It would be easier if the mechanism made some kind of sense, but it's just a prop, so it seems like it's just random parts put together to look like something... (I hope I'm not insulting the designer of the suit.)

The forearm part is quite similar to the upper arm and some of the parts from the arms can be reused for the legs.

arm00.jpeg
 
Initially, I was trying to model the shape of the arm joint while at the same time making it a functional joint. It turns out that "form follows function" was a better approach, so I modeled a joint first and then started decorating to make it look more like the prop I wanted. This was already over a week ago. There's still room for refinement on the joint and it's not connected to the other pieces, but it's a good start (I'll attach a Fusion360 render of what I have). I started on the lower arm piece, but I haven't put much effort into it yet.

arm01.jpeg

I also started planning how to mount these pieces on my arms. I'll print separate platforms with holes for screws and attachment points for straps. This way, if I iterate on the visual parts of the prop, I don't have to redo any of the mounting pieces and vice versa.

One key component that may seem trivial that I think I mentioned earlier is that I wanted to use buckles of my own design to attach the straps to the armor. I've done quite a bit of testing & designing, trying various ideas (even printing and testing parts). Finally today, I managed to decide on a very simple design that is easy to incorporate into existing 3D-printed pieces and that is also functional. The reason this is an important idea is that the "female" part of the buckle is going to be incorporated directly onto the prop pieces (or the platforms I mentioned above). After printing a few prototypes and iterating on the design, I printed a small corner of one of the platforms and one of the male buckles (shown in the photo).

Here's a photo of a protype buckle and the small segment with the latest male buckle with a 1.5" strap looped through. Printed with black eSun PLA at 0.2mm layer height. I'll probably use PETG fro the final male buckles to make them easier to open (PLA is quite stiff, but the buckle still works and hasn't cracked).

buckle00.jpg

The screenshot from Fusion360 shows what an upper arm platform might look like before I add holes for screws & possibly routes for wires etc. The groups of four holes in the corners are where the straps will attach and the curved part will be padded an go on my arm. The flat part (on the bottom) is where the prop will mount. You can see that just by "punching" holes of the right kind with a tool body, I can make strap attachment points on nearly any flat surface.

buckle01.jpg

I'm starting to feel some time pressure now... Not yet worried about Dragon Con, because I think I can start printing pretty soon (either while designing the legs or right after), but because I would like to have this costumer ready well before Dragon Con and potentially use it somewhere before that. We'll see... I was back to work last week and had some family & sports activities that left me too tired to work on the CAD stuff on a couple of evenings.
 
I had a busy week at work, but I took Friday off, so I was able to get some CAD done yesterday and today. I haven't really broken new territory, but I have been refactoring some parts of the arm design (replacing a core part of a design is hard work in Fusion 360, especially if you've been a bit too liberal about geometry references across parts). As with the sword, the parts should fit together nicely attach mostly with screws for easy assembly and disassembly.

My plan for the electronics is also solidifying. The processor will be on left wrist. I bought a whole bunch of Arduino displays earlier this summer and decided to embed a 0.96" 128x64 OLED display on the arm. About a week ago, I made sure the one I had was working and that I had the libraries to use it. Obviously that's an upgrade over the suit in the show, but I love adding small upgrades like this.

Another upgrade is that I ordered and received some NeoPixels rings and will embed 12-pixel rings in each of the joints (elbows & knees). The lights will glow through the holes on the upper parts of the joint. I printed an earlier version of the lowest part of the joint to test how the ring fits.

The photo shows the display running the basic Adafruit demo and the RGB LED ring fitted into the test print of the joint.

electronics00.jpg
 
I made good progress with the arm structures & plans for electronics on Sunday. A PLA filament + wire shipment arrived today from Hobbyking, so I felt like printing a small test print...and then disaster struck: the extruder stepper motor on the 3D printer would just click back and forth. That was 4 hours ago... I was almost sure I had blown a stepper driver, but I opened up the printer and in the end it turned out to be a loose wire inside the electronics box. I almost ordered replacements for the printer controller electronics from Amazon, but luckily it was something I could fix easily.

The cables going from the back of the suit to the arms are going to be 6mm polyurethane tube. Hopefully it spraypaints well enough as the tube is naturally clear. The test print I did today was to test how the tube fits into a 3D print. It turns out the tube fits really snugly and will not need set screws to stay in. I had to make the back plate a bit thicker than it was (it was probably too thin anyway) to fit the holes on it, but I'm really glad I have that "engineering problem" solved now.

I'm tempted to run the electronics wires through the tubes, but I think in the end it will be better to embed the wires into the straps that will attach the arms to the chest/shoulder/back unit.

I bought a WorldCon75 ticket. I have just a bit over two weeks, if I want to use this costume there... I think a really tight deadline is exactly what I need to motivate myself now and make sure I have the costume 100% ready in one month.
 
I'm on vacation again and I'm finally printing stuff. I start to print parts as soon as that part of the design is finished.

There are two types of pistons in the suit, both of which repeat several times. I designed the small ones to be clip-on interchangeable power packs that can contain an 18650 LiIon battery (with a built-in protection circuit, so it's the slightly longer version that we're not supposed to call the 18650, but still do). It's the same battery I use in the sword, so I can carry spare batteries for the suit and sword in them. The one in the left arm will be the one powering the system and the rest will just be attached to the suit without electrical connections. The photo shows four of these already assembled (one of them contains a battery) and one disassembled to show what the parts look like.

build00.jpg

The assembled spine segments are on the right. I'll probably print the top piece tonight. The bottom has a whole bunch of strap buckles and you can see one clipped on to a translucent support/guide piece that is used to mount the top discs (on the left) to the main part of the upper arm. I should have the upper arms and joints printed out soon. The right lower arm should be very simple to finish as it doesn't contain any electronics, but the left one will need a bit more work. I still need to print the shoulder pieces and the neck. I'll move on to the legs after that. I'm hoping that I will have time to build a decent version of the leg armors within about 9 days.

Nothing has been painted yet, but I'm using silver PLA and getting pretty nice quality straight out of the printer (everything is designed to print cleanly on FDM), so the paint job is going to really light and leave a lot of the original color showing. I could use the armor without painting it and I think it would look quite OK. The translucent supports will need some silver & black paint to blend in - those are PETG and I don't have a silver PETG.

I hope to have photos of completed assemblies in my next update.
 
Only a few more days left before WorldCon. I'm having doubts about getting the legs done before that, but we'll see. I hope to have something there. I'm confident about having a good costume for Dragoncon, which was my original goal anyway.

I have all the neck/shoulder/back prop pieces printed and I'm working on the assembly. As part of that, I designed a connecting piece for the shoulders. I originally planned on using fabric and glue etc, but this really is a 3D-print heavy project and I came up with a cool technique to make a really strong & flexible mesh backing using PETG. It looks very high tech and I'm totally loving it... Here's a photo of one of the shoulders.

build01.jpg

The black part with the strap loops and hex mesh is printed flat, but the mesh & the flexibility of PETG allows it to be shaped to fit inside the shoulder. It just snaps & screws into place – there's no glue. It seems very strong. The mesh is not modeled as such - it's created using a special Simplify3D slicing software configuration.

In other news, I have all 4 arm/leg joints printed out and the right upper arm completely printed and assembled. The lower arm still needs some design work, but I'll start printing the few pieces I'm still missing for the left upper arm tomorrow. Today was a 100% PETG day on the printer (I find that switching from PLA to PETG initially makes for sub-par PETG parts, so it's best to do PETG printing is batches instead of constantly switching).
 
Getting the legs even designed before WorldCon turned out to be unrealistic, so I focused on things I needed to do to have something wearable for WorldCon this week. I was just an hour or two of work short of getting to wear it today (Thursday). Right now, the software is just a quick and dirty rip-off of the sword UI. It looks pretty nice, but there's a lot I could do. I ran into some problems with RAM, because the display driver frame buffer uses a significant amount of memory and doesn't leave much for the rest of the app. I have ideas on how to work around this (easiest of which is to use text only with no bitmap frame buffer). The electronics are missing some small features that I can live without, but would like to have. Last, I don't have all the straps to wear this (just enough for one arm at the moment), but that's easily fixed with the sewing machine in maybe an hour or so.

Here are some photos of the build I had ready this morning.

build02.jpg
build03.jpg
 
I caught up on sleep between Thursday and Friday and then pushed again to get a costume ready for Saturday at Worldcon. It wasn't entirely easy, but in the end I had a good build with the screen menus and voltage display working on top of the animation code I had copied from the sword project.

I had a blast cosplaying at Worldcon75. At the moment, I only have photos from my iPhone and DJI drone. Here's a shot from my iPhone. You may be able to find some photos (and video) taken by others posted on the web in the near future.

worldcon02.jpg

The suit did pretty well in most respects. The connector on the right arm was a bit choppy at times and the connector was going deeper into the armor each time I adjusted it, so in the end I couldn't even plug it back in (and my allen key was in the car, so I didn't fix it). Battery life was superb on both the armor and the sword with the LiIon on the armor at 3.9V and the sword at 3.8V after around 8 hours at Worldcon.

The sword also developed some connection issues between the LED strip and hilt, but those were relatively minor and could be fixed without an Allen key. As the blade flexes, it tends to pull the LED strip away from the connector. I can try using more of the 3M adhesive under the strip (at the moment only a few cm is used, so it doesn't hold that well). Replacing the connector with something that locks would be more work than I'm willing to do now.

The joints need a bit of lubrication as they were becoming a bit sqeaky towards the end of the day. The elbow joint tends to pinch my arm if everything isn't perfectly aligned and I try to reach up to adjust my hair or take a drink etc.

I think the costume worked great even without the legs, but I'll certainly do my best to have some version of the leg armor at DragonCon. Movement with the leg boosters might be a bit more cumbersome.

Oops, the second uploaded photo got posted accident. It looks a bit funny as a thumbnail, but it's not a bad photo (and I can't figure out how to remove it).
 

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That came out really cool. Seeing the pieces was interesting, but seeing it all together on someone really makes it stand out. Do you still plan to do the legs?
 
Thanks. I'm pleased with the results so far. It has been a lot more work than I expected (but that's true of most things in life – optimists do thing because they expect the road to be easy while pessimists never even start because they know long it is going to take). My Fusion 360 skills are far beyond what they were when I started and I learned quite a bit about building electronics too.

I will do my best to get legs done for DragonCon. It might be without the leg brace parts (or I might try to make those out of foam). I have the joints and pistons ready for legs and there are a lot of similarities between the legs and arms. The main difference is how they are attached to the body.

I'm also going to be working on the software. While the Adafruit graphics library was easy to use, it swallows up almost all free RAM, making it difficult to do anything else. There are other graphics libraries for the display. It also makes the rotary controller miss some steps, so I'm going to try to fix that.

Finally, I need to do something about the connectors for the arms. They pull out all too easily right now. I could keep the same connectors I use now and just add some kind of locking mechanism or I could switch to a different connector type (my original plan was to use RJ-11, so I'll consider that again, but I also received some other connectors in the mail a few days ago, so I'll take a closer too at them too).

I have just over two weeks and I'm going back to work tomorrow, so we'll see how much I can get done before the end of the month.
 
I was trying to get the USB upload on the Pro Trinket processor to work, but instead of getting it to work reliably, I had all kinds of issues and at that point I thought I had killed the processor and at another, I thought I had killed the display. I had spares, so that was OK. Turns out both were OK and I managed to get the system running again.

One of the issues I had with the software was that the OLED display update was taking too long and affecting the rotary controller and causing it to skip steps, so I spent a bit of time on an Arduino Uno (my development system for this) to try to get it to work through interrupts. This didn't lead anywhere useful, so I left it at that.

The other issue was that the Adafruit Graphics library was really RAM hungry, leaving very little for the rest of the system. There's fortunately a good alternative to that library in the form of the u8g2 (and u8g8) libraries. The u8g2 library can be configured to use minimal RAM. That config makes it pretty slow, but it's giving control back to you frequently, so I was able to poll the rotary controller frequently enough to make it work perfectly. The memory footprint is really low and it takes less program space than the Adafruit library even when I'm including two different fonts (a large proportional and a smaller monospaced). I just finished rewriting the code to use u8g2 and I'm really pleased with the results now. The software could use more work in that it's not really specialized for the armor yet (the animations and settings are for the blade), but I'll take care of that some day - probably next week.

I have some modifications in mind for the arm pieces that I will work on at low priority:

1) There's a spot that pinches my skin at extreme angles that I should be able to eliminate. It actually left small marks on both my forearms and was a bit painful at times.
2) As I mentioned earlier, I need to do something about the connectors coming loose. There are several possible solutions, some of them potentially involving reprinting some of the larger pieces.
3) If I end up printing new versions, I might as well try to make some other improvements. Mainly adding more space for extra wiring. The current design is great if the wires are approximately the right length, but the wire passages becomes cramped if there's too much extra wire.
4) If I reprint the left forearm pieces, it would be nice to make more space for the wires and electronics there too. Ideally I would make a custom PCB with a bunch of connectors and a few passive components, but I don't have time to learn how to do that and get it done in time for DragonCon. I definitely want to learn custom PCB making, so I'm going to look into that after DragonCon. That may allow me to add a bunch of new sensors to the electronics. Right now there's just enough room for the bare bones stuff + all the extra wire. The wires really eat up space fast.

I really like the cheap HobbyKing silver PLA, so I bought 4kg more of that and also a 1kg roll of their black PETG. So now I have over 5kg of HobbyKing silver PLA (I started with 2kg, so I have used less than 1kg of it) and over 1kg of eSun silver PLA (in case I need to print replacement parts for parts that were already printed with that filament). The black PETG worked fine on my printer, so it was nice to find a good budget option for the PrimaSelect PETG that I had been using (750g roll for €30 vs. 1kg roll for €20 -> half price even though it's still twice the cost of PLA/kg).

I'll start working on CAD for the leg armors on Friday.

Here's an elevator mirror selfie from WorldCon75. I added some grain and vignetting and adjusted the exposure & contrast a bit to make it a bit more gritty.

worldcon03.jpg
 
Brilliant work. I'm actually surprised PLA is standing up to that much flex without breaking - but your prints look incredibly finished, are you using these as they come from the printer or are you smoothing them and painting?
 
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