The Iron Girl Project - History

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away….no, wait, that’s a different story.

Once upon a time, I saw the movie Iron Man (2008). I’d never been a huge comic book girl (working on it), and I wouldn’t have known Marvel from direct current. All I knew was that I needed to build a suit like that. Desperately.

So I started researching how much of it could be an actual possibility. I’d had some experience with robotics and code, so I figured that would help. But I ran into a brick wall at actually fabricating parts. I lived in a college dorm at the time, and I already was getting away with soldering and drilling - I wasn’t about to push my luck doing castings or metalworking. So I closed the books on it for a while, and put it on the shelf.

I built another robot, some computers, and started gradually acquiring parts for a workshop. I got my hands on a drill press last year, and did some basic metalworking. Found it wasn’t quite for me, but I could at least do it in a pinch if I needed to. I started getting out the Iron Man suit notes again and riffling through them.

And then the Raspberry Pi came out.

At first I didn’t much care about it - I investigated the GPIO pins on it, and realized everything was 3.3v, and to top it off, there were no Analog pins. I scoffed and went back to tinkering on my Arduino.

It was a week or so later when I was trying to run two pieces of servo code simultaneously when I realized how limited the Arduino was. I’d been tinkering with the idea of a War Machine turret-thingy, but had no clear idea of what I wanted it to do. However, I ran into the limitations of processing rather quickly. So I took my Raspberry Pi back out and started (grudgingly) to figure out the GPIO side of it. Thanks to Adafruit’s amazing Learning System pages, I got analog data from an Arduino fed into the Raspberry Pi, and even got Python to react to it. I was hooked.

From there, things got sort of intense. Within a few weeks I had I2C up and working, and a repulsor palm being run by a Trinket controlled by Python, which would also handle sound effects. The next week, I had a Raspberry Pi camera module, and by the time Sunday rolled around, I had a vague HUD working. And here we are.

So now you’ve had your boring history lesson. Go do something awesome and exciting.

~Lexikitty