About

For Halloween, I decided to go as Tony Stark. As is appropriate for the character, I made the costume myself, in the basement, with a box of scraps!

Picture of completed costume

Arc Reactor

The arc reactor was designed for minimum thickness.

I used an FR4 circuit board as the base. The circuit board contains a set of bright SMT LEDs, current-limiting resistors, an Attiny44 to pulse the LEDs, and various other supporting components.

Stacked on top of this PCB is a spacer layer of clear acrylic (with holes cut out above the components), then a layer of white acrylic to diffuse the light. On top, a silver vinyl-cut sticker creates a distinctive pattern.

Arc reactor, turned off

Arc reactor, turned on

The device is sized to interface with an heart-rate monitor's elastic strap. It glows brightly through a T-shirt!

Palm Repulsor

The palm repulsor is mounted an acrylic base. I used a heat gun to bend the acrylic so that it fits around my hand.

Repulsor

Repulsor, rear view

Repulsor on my hand

The repulsor runs in three modes, controlled by the buttons on the rear PCB. In its default mode, it slowly pulses. The duty cycle varies from 10% to 30%.

One button activates full brightness mode, making it a useful flashlight. The other button activates an obnoxious strobe, flashing on and off at about 8 Hz.

Downloads

Project files (zip file, 1.4 MB)

This archive includes PCB design files (done in Eagle), firmware + Makefiles, and design files for the acrylic components.

The acrylic parts were designed in kokopelli, a custom CAD tool that I'm developing as part of my research, and fabricated using the fab modules. Both tools can be downloaded from the kokompe project homepage.