May 4, 2015 | By Alec
While Halloween is still months away, if you’re looking to 3D print a whole costume you probably had to start last December. Those whole Samus and Iron Man suits simply take a lot of time. Fortunately, engineering student Daniel Harari proves that a 3D printed costume doesn’t have to take years of your life to complete and can still be fun and original. For he has designed a costume that allows you to be yourself: a character from The Sims.
Of course, key to this project is the multicolored crystal characters wear above their heads (called a Plumbob). This battery-powered 3D printed accessory is filled with RGB lights, controlled via Bluetooth and app to enable them to change color. It’s perfect for letting people know what you think of their party.
As Daniel explained, the entire project sort of grew out of laziness as he was looking for a costume at the last moment. ‘It’s just two hollow hexagonal pyramids glued to each other. Lazy me didn’t want to start modeling so I found a pre-made model on Thingiverse. The shape was perfect and I had the perfect material for the job – a translucent green PLA filament,’ he writes on his website. ‘I chose this material because I wanted to put lights inside that would illuminate the Plumbob in different colors, the material was translucent enough for colors to penetrate and be seen at night and it was green so it would be recognizable in the day, when the lights are not very visible.’
The 3D printing part itself is fairly simple; just download the 3D printable files from Thingiverse and 3D print them in PLA (preferably green, of course) at 190 degrees C. 0.3mm layer height and 100% infill. Printing itself should take about six hours in total. Only wearing is a bit more complicated, as ideally it would float several inches above your head. To solve that problem, Daniel glued three hair bows together and built a tin construction on top of it to hold the stem to the crystal. ‘The stem is an aluminum tube cut to length with the ends split and bent to follow the contour of the hexagon pyramid to be attached to it on one side, and the tin base plate on the other,’ Daniel says. Before gluing it to the Plumbob, the whole thing was spray-painted black.
Now you could technically stop right there and have a perfectly acceptable The Sims outfit, though its effect is obviously a bit diminished when its dark. Therefore Daniel took things to the next level by cramming the Plumbob full of electronics. Specifically, an Arduino Pro Mini, a Bluetooth module, six RGB LEDs and a step-up converter inside the 3D printed Plumbob (and an AA battery compartment on the headband). ‘The circuit had to be mounted to a post made of aluminum tube, so I had to insulate the tube to prevent shorts. The circuit was held in place with zip ties, the LEDs were wrapped around and hot glued in place so that they point in different directions to illuminate the whole shape (in retrospect, I could have used shorter leads for the LEDs),’ he explains.
Programming the Plumbob is also remarkably easy, as the code is provided alongside the App. ‘I didn’t have time to write an android application, so I found a free one on the Play Store that fit my needs exactly. There are a lot of applications that do similar things and much more, but this one had a friendly interface and did just what I wanted,’ Daniel says. That means that this is has all the potential to become the easiest and most impressive Halloween costume you’ve ever had. Head over to Daniel’s website here to find the code and all the assembly details. Now if only we could see someone wearing it.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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