Jellyfish Interface

The first reactor’s finally done, at least electronics-wise!

While waiting for the next batch of reactor (and jellyfish) parts, we’ve started working on the animatronic butterflies for the gown.  So far, it’s just a tentative framework.  Next step is to find springs for it.

Well, the motor’s working (sort of).  Since the controller’s just pulsing the three coils in sequence with no regard for feedback or hall sensors, it jerks around instead of spinning.  Fortunately, that’s the look we’re going for!  It’s getting really packed in the push-light’s battery bay.

After much frustrated muttering and a few bad transistors, all the segments are up and running a trigonometric fade algorithm.  It looks like there are a lot more than three sets of LEDs going on and off, doesn’t it?

After an intense work session yesterday, we’ve gotten all the LEDs glued to both reactors, muslin prototypes done for the gown and one of the shirts, and all the LEDs are wired up for one of the reactors (six hours of soldering = fun).  Here’s a video of it running its first segment test.  There are three segments, so it’ll be three times as bright as this:

The surface-mount LEDs arrived yesterday, and they’re the perfect brightness (~2700mcd).  I’ve been working on supergluing them to the reactor and attaching wires.

Heat is a real problem at DragonCon, even at night, so we’re going to stay away from a full armor vest.  Since the medic costume’s skirt is inspired by the Roman “lorica segmentata”, the armor will be designed to incorporate those elements as well (in steel and black plastic, instead of natural leather).  Polished steel segments for the pauldron will probably be articulated with servos for some creepy slow-motion effects.  We’ll make chevron-like “active cohesion armor” plates for the arm, with attachment points for the optical fibre bundles, and the plates will continue all the way down to the wrist.

So, I’ve added some thinner copper wires around the edges for both accents and pressure on the motor.  I’ve also attached the wire winding plates to the motor itself.  The second reactor’s coming along nicely, too:

LEDs should arrive this week, so hopefully I can start the wiring soon.

We’ve cut and mounted a hard drive spindle motor in the center, and routed some heavy-gauge copper grounding wire around the rings for effect.  It still looks like a push-light.