The Iron Girl Project - Repulsors, Part 1

The repulsor units are obvious necessities for any Iron Man-themed cosplay, costume, or suit. This was one of those situation where, even though the tech doesn’t technically exist, I still had to incorporate the component into the design. To make up for the lack of actual functionality, I decided I required two things from it:

The light coming out of the palm would have to be substantially bright (“enough to blind a camera momentarily” became my benchmark)
The repulsor would have to let me know it successfully fired, and I could relay that data back up to the HUD.
To satisfy all this, I ended up using the Adafruit Trinket. Not only did it come in a native 3.3v variant, but it supported I2C (via the TinyWire library) as well as the NeoPixel library, which was of interest.

For the light source, I used a 12-LED NeoPixel Ring in conjunction with a BL-HP20A 1W LED. The LED, when mounted on the heatsink, just fit inside the NeoPixel Ring. I got some test code onto the Trinket and the end result was this:

Which I thought didn’t look half bad. But it still didn’t flash or do anything all that exciting. Which is what I made Part 2 is for!

See you after the jump,

~Lexikitty