#trinket pro

[pipefail]

Custom LED accent lighting project I just finished for some mobile party installations. Arduino Trinket Pro (5V logic) driven LED strips for atmosphere in festivals, camps, raves, chillout tents, etc. All are wired with 5V din power, 3 pin molex. 

Code below: 

Rainbow colors (first 2 strips): https://github.com/byxorna/led-projec... 

Orange and purple strips (3, 4): https://github.com/byxorna/led-projec...

[siesna]

So I’m very proud of the coat I made for Lup, of the IPRE patch that I designed and embroidered, the makeup that I psyched myself into actually doing, but THIS! This is my most favorite thing I’ve ever made.

The Phoenix Fire Gauntlet, made to look like it’s made of cracked, glowing lava. If you look closely, you can even make out a subtle phoenix motif in the plates.

Read under the cut to see what it’s made out of!

It’s powered by an Arduino Trinket Pro, a strip of Neopixels that I butchered into smaller pieces (it’s a horror show of badly soldered wires under there guys), and a rechargable lithium ion battery. I wrote the program using the FastLED library.

The gauntlet itself is made out of garbage. I’m not exaggerating. The base is plastic shelf liner. The vambrace part is laminated in layers (4-6 of them, I can’t remember exactly) with contact cement to provide strength, keep the curve, and properly diffuse the light from the LEDs. The lava plates are 6mm black craft foam. They’ve been heat sealed, which also opened up the scores I put on them to look like cracks. 

The finger and wrist pieces are one layer of plastic shelf liner, with black cardstock glued on top of it. IT’S GARBAGE GUYS, I’M BEING SERIOUS. I was afraid of paint rubbing off in the many joints, but I couldn’t use a black base because I needed the light to shine through the frosted white plastic. So I literally just using contact cement and glued cardstock to it. It’s been working out great so far. It’s nice and matte and I don’t have to worry about paint coming off, and I haven’t had any adhesion problems yet. It also let me easily cut “cracks” into the cardstock and peel them away, letting light through.

It’s all been “riveted” to a leather glove. I put that in quotes because I couldn’t find rivets small enough for a reasonable price. So I relied on an old cosplayer trick that I’ve used before, and used scrapbooking brads. Does this mean I have the pointy bits of 50 brads poking me in the fingers inside the glove? Yes. Yes it does. But honestly, I’m not sure how I would have done proper rivets anyway, with as little room as I had to work with.

The pattern I used to make the gauntlet was purchased from armortemplates.com and then modified. It was only $5, which is good, because if I was buying a template I fully expected something, like, digitally drawn, not a scan of someone’s hand drawn pattern, and I would have been miffed if I’d paid more than that. But I really like the final result, and it definitely saved me some time, so I guess I can’t complain too much.

So yeah. Plastic shelf liner, craft foam, paper, scrapbooking brads, and a leather glove from a previous cosplay. And just a little mist of black spray paint to diffuse the light coming through the cracks. IT’S TRASH, JUST LIKE LUP. <3

[siesna]

Reaction to my Phoenix Fire Gauntlet was very positive, so here’s a video of it in action!

Go to this post for more info about the gauntlet!

[houseoflulu]

Got a button to work in my prototype, still working on it though because it doesn't seem to work when the trinket is powered by battery. Eventually I want this button to change the lighting sequence modes for the system.

[houseoflulu]

Scaled up to 5 LEDs and a Trinket Pro. With Trinket Pro, I’ll have enough PWM GPIOs to do fadey pulses for each LED (instead of just flat digital blinks).

Prototype modeled by my 3D printed hand (designed by bqLabs on thingiverse (906098))