Assembly Instructions! This is another 3D printed kit from Enza3D

FREE 3D print files can be downloaded and printed at the links above! These files are free, and MyMiniFactory exclusive - if you found them somewhere else please let me know!

This kit is way simpler than the Eye of Agamotto one, no moving parts, no complicated assemblies, pretty much just a print, paint and wear set-up. There are some additional components which as always can be purchased on our our Etsy page which is also linked above

Parts Overview

The extensive 3D printed parts list is available on the MyMiniFactory page. (link above)

In addition to the 3D printed parts there are a handful of purchased components as well as cast parts which add to the aesthetic of the final assembly. We offer these extra components on our etsy page in a few different configurations. Some of these components are expensive so we have tried to offer a few configurations that are cost sensitive.

One part that we do not provide is the Circuit playground from Adafruit. You can buy that directly from them on their website. https://bit.ly/2RvkTDI

This instruction set will assume you have purchased the set that includes everything, I will do my best to make a note of where discrepancies would occur at lower tier configurations.

The Configurations are as follows;

The Full Prop kit includes everything you need to make the prop screen accurate, 6 castings of satellite lenses, a large central casting, several shafts and pins, as well as 6 small LED’s and the heat shrink tubing necessary for the cable runs.

The No Heat Shrink Kit includes everything except the heat shrink, this is the most expensive part of the assembly so it significantly reduces the cost. If you are comfortable sewing it is definitely less expensive to sew your own tubes on the connectors. It won't look quite as nice but it will be much cheaper.

The Full Frontal kit contains everything you need to make the prop, with 3 of the satellite pieces. 3 out of the six are hidden almost at all times. Making only 3 of them can give you 80% of the look with much less cost

The Just the Pins Kit only has the necessary pins and shafts. Only buy this kit if you plan on SLA’ing or printing your own lenses, have LED’s already and can sew the tubes for the cable runs yourself.

Assembly

Assembly Time!

It should go without saying that you should print all of the things necessary for this kit before starting it. For this kit in particular I would recommend dry fitting everything first to make sure there is nothing crazy happening with fits and tolerances. As always there are a handful of parts you are going to have to tweak the fit of. There are several “flaps” around the perimeter of the assembly. They are held into place by a few long pins. The flaps holes should be drilled out to ~2.5mm

Dual Pin.JPG — The flaps holes should be drilled out to ~2.5mm

Single Pin.JPG — The hole on the main body should be drilled out to something larger ~3mm

Other than that most things should print and be ready to go, other than paint.

I like to start final assembly with the main body on this one. Once the 6 flaps around the perimeter are drilled insert the longest pin into each hole this should secure them.

Next step is to take the inner and outer rings as well as the largest casting and place them in the center. Some light sanding might be required here.

NOTE: If you are buying a kit that doesn't have castings please print this part, it won’t look that good if its not clear ish though.

The next part is kind of tedious. It just involves lots of gluing shafts. Most of the shafts can go in as is, the ones in the spacers look brassish to me so I painted them before glueing them in place. Feel free to change it up if you would like to. I started this step by screwing together the spider and the main body, you can do this from behind, it only takes 3 or so screw to secure it.

Each of these steps adds a tremendous amount of high fidelity detail to the parts.

You could viably stop here, put a circuit playground in the back and have a wildly convincing prop which is very easy to put together, the rest of the assembly gets a lot harder mainly due to soldering wires in tight spots and just generally wrangling a prop with floppy bits, not impossible just noticeably more difficult.

The next part is in tandem to some degree with the electrical side of the project, I am going to switch to real world photos since it is easier to show that way. I will have a basic circuit schematic as part of the electronics section.

You’re going to need to run 6 sets of 4 wires these will be V, GND, Din, and Dout. These wires should be the length that is required to run to the satellite pieces to the desired location. Remember in the end there are going to be 3 pieces on your back, I ship the full kits with ~6ft of heat shrink tubing, you will need a similar amount of wires. I have designed dovetail-esque pieces which slide into both the main body and satellite pieces to act as strain relief and they also help with wire management.

Once that is done you can put the circuit playground into place. Make sure to point the USB into the slot that was created for it (FUN fact I did this with a soldering iron, but reflected this change in the CAD so you shouldn't have to :D) Then go to town soldering all the components into place.

The next part is pretty simple but I didn't get any good photos of it. You have to place the heat shrink tubing over the wire runs and determine the final lengths of both the wires and the tubing.
The tubing itself is designed to be heated and shrink down onto the dovetail connectors. Start with the end closest to the body, and then hit the end with the satellite on it. It might be easier to solder the wires for the LED’s before doing the final heat shrink application, the heat shrink fits over the LED’s so it can be done last.

At this point you are pretty much done, if you did it correctly you should be able to upload some simple test code to make all of it work. Congrats!

Sewing

At this point I just purchased a jacket on Amazon that looked roughly close and sewed the prop onto it. I cut a hole in the left breast pocket to allow me to snake a USB cable from the circuit board down to my pocket for a standard USB battery. Super Con friendly ;D

I included a bunch of channels on the final print to act as places to pass a needle through to make securing it to your garment of choice fairly easy!

I sewed the main body, and the 3 left satellite pieces onto the jacket and secured the 3 right ones (which cross the zipper) with velcro so I could still take the jacket off normally.

Electronics

Fritzing CAD.JPG — Electronics are fairly basic, all the complicated bits are contained in the circuit playground. The basic layout is the neopixels get power in two “banks” from the left and right side of the circuit playground and a single data line controls the 6 external LED’s.

Code

Code here is shamelessly Copied from an adafruit tutorial, I added a few lines of code to get the External strip to light up but the code did exactly what I was looking for right out of the gate, so no need to reinvent the wheel.

“//This is Repurposed Code from the Jack-o-Lantern Project on Adafruit

#include “Adafruit_NeoPixel.h”
#define NUM_PIXELS 10
Adafruit_NeoPixel CP(NUM_PIXELS, 17, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);
Adafruit_NeoPixel strip(NUM_PIXELS, 6, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);
void setup() {
CP.begin(); // Initializes LED’s on the Circuit Python
strip.begin(); // Initializes external LED’s}
uint8_t prev = 128; // Start brightness in middle
void loop() {
uint8_t lvl = random(64, 192); // End brightness at 128±64
split(prev, lvl, 32); // Start subdividing, ±32 at midpoint
prev = lvl; // Assign end brightness to next start
}
void split(uint8_t y1, uint8_t y2, uint8_t offset) {
if(offset) { // Split further into sub-segments w/midpoint at ±offset
uint8_t mid = (y1 + y2 + 1) / 2 + random(-offset, offset);
split(y1 , mid, offset / 2); // First segment (offset is halved)
split(mid, y2 , offset / 2); // Second segment (ditto)
} else { // No further subdivision - y1 determines LED brightness
uint32_t c = (((int)(pow((float)y1 / 255.0, 2.7) * 255.0 + 0.5) // Gamma
* 0x1004004) >> 8) & 0xFF3F03; // Expand to 32-bit RGB color
for(uint8_t i=0; i for(uint8_t i=0; i CP.show();
strip.show();
delay(4);
}
}”

Paint

Paint on this took a while since we wanted a nice chrome surface. 3D printed parts were sanded and primed several times to get a nice smooth base layer followed by a high gloss black to prep the surface for the final coat of metallic paint. The entire prop was painted before final assembly and then was weathered heavily with black shoe polish.