R2D2 android figure DIY
Note: I followed the instructions and recommendations provided here at this wonderful blog: http://keropuni.blogspot.jp/2012/08/re-projector-dome.html but as it was lacking in many details, I faced various trials and tribulations that I will jot down here :)
Tools & materials needed:
VERY IMPORTANT: get a hand-held rotary tool (see step #1 below for more details) with at least a grinder, a sander, a cutter wheel, and a drill in the kit (highly recommend this one)
1-4 DIY blank android mini figures (depends on how much you think you will fuck up), at least they are cheap!
Projector dome (I got both the milky way and spiral galaxy)
1 soldering iron (+soldering materials, you can buy a cheap kit from Amazon for ~$12)
1-3 micro usb (female) adapters (again, maybe you will fuck up? ^^;)
a bushel of resistors (I got a variety pack from radio shack)
some white LEDs (I got some IL051 3V clear white LEDs from Amazon)
Acrylic paint in silver, copper, and optionally gold, a really nice size 2 and size 8 paint brush
Sticky clear paper
Blue sharpie (or if you have a steady hand and a lot of patience, blue acrylic paint)
Painters tape
Super strong glue (I used "liquid nails")
Nail polish remover (when you need to correct your paint mistakes)
Steps:
1. After your projector dome arrives in the mail, dismantle the ball and take out the "projector" part, which consists of a plastic tube with a few lenses stuck in the middle of a big flat plastic wheel. Proceed to "free" the tube from the wheel. For the first projector dome, all I had were some sewing scissors and a tiny handrill. I basically hacked at the plastic wheel and drilled holes into it for 3+ hours until I got the sides of the tube down to smooth, but I realized I still needed to sand it (since it was still tremendously lumpy) so it was at that moment, I did most genius thing of the whole project - I went on amazon and bought a hand-held rotary tool. Also at this point, my scissors broke and my drill stopped working... For the second projector dome, the whole process only took me < 15 min with the rotary tool (I used the wheel cutter and then the sander).
2. Draw a nice hole in the android head where you want the projector to stick out and carve out the hole. Make sure the top of the tube you sanded fits in the hole.
3. You also need to grind/sand the bottom of the head so that the projector tube fits snugly in the head (normally, the hole at the bottom of the android head is WAY small). See the pictures in the previously linked blog for more details if you need it.
At this point, you can do several things in parallel or while you wait for purchases from Amazon to arrive :) So in no particular order...
4. Complete the LED circuit - I used a micro USB female adapter as a power source. I bought some long cable on amazon and hacked the plastic apart with kitchen scissors (RIP fancy sewing scissors) and thankfully, the wires were nicely intact, so I soldered the + wire to my resistor, the resistor to the + side of the LED, and the - side of the LED to the ground wire of the 5-pin micro usb. I'm too lazy to draw a circuit diagram but its pretty simple, I think you can figure it out :) the voltage of usb is usually 4.5-5.5V so I went with (5.5V - 3.2V) / 0.02 = 115 ohms (the closest higher resistor I had was 120 ohm, which was brown red brown gold. voila~
This was my practice circuit with a 9V battery and crappy yellow LED from radio shack
and a nice pile of stripped plastic on the right
For my second android, I didn't have another long wire usb adapter. I had these tiny female micro to male USB adapters, so I stripped the plastic, only to have the wires connected to the 5-pins fall off :( So then I just soldered my stuff directly to the left-most and right-most pins (you can look up online which one is + and which one is ground)... and it WORKED! awesomeness :D
If you want an alternate approach using a switch & battery (the blog I followed also tried this alternate approach), you can refer to the very end of this post about my "failure" attempts. The circuit definitely worked and it looked pretty cool in the android but it wasn't "production" quality and I grossly miscalculated the size of the battery... sadness. I think the usb method is easier though...
5. Drill hole in the foot of the android and shape it with a grinder so that it can house the micro usb.
6. Paint the bottom of the android and the rim of the head copper. I used acrylic paint but without any primer cuz I was lazy. Did about 4-5 coats each :) acrylic paint dries fast. It helps if you have a good brush, the hairs on the first brush I used kept falling off and mixing into the paint - super pain in the ass to get off as the paint is drying. Whenever I fucked up, I used a q-tip with nail polish remover to gently wipe some paint off. It worked pretty well.
7. Print the body of the android (very grateful that the original blog post had this nice template) on the clear sticky paper. I actually experimented with both white sticky and clear sticky paper. The white didn't look as good - you can check for yourself if you don't believe my picture below :) Cut out the sticky and paste it onto the body. I did some ad-hoc designs on the arms (cut out random rectangles and paste). However, the sticky paper didn't stick so well on such a small circumference and the ends kept peeling back so I had to use some clear tape to hold them in place. The sheen of the clear sticky paper is really nice but my only complaint about it is that the ink can be scratched off pretty easily. I would definitely not categorize the android as weather-hardy or tumble resistant. Be careful about scratching it up :O
Left: white sticky paper vs Right: clear sticky paper
8. Glue the usb adapter into the foot (my liquid nails glue is really strong, but took 24 hours to fully dry). I used eyebrow tweezer to place it into the foot. Now it has glue on the tips, RIP eyebrow tweezer :(
9. Paint the head - I gave it about 4 coats of silver paint, painted on the circles with gold paint, and drew the rest of the squares by hand using a blue sharpie (with strips of painters tape for straight line guidance). I think you have a steady hand and go about it very slowly, you can accomplish the same with a precision paintbrush and blue acrylic paint. But I love my sharpie art and I feel a lot more confident using it and I didn't want to paint 4 coats of blue paint so I went with my option. Btw, did you know there's oil based sharpies for drawing on wood and plastic? Too bad I didn't see it on Google Shopping Express until I finished drawing.
PS, if you fuck up a little with the sharpie, you can paint more silver over it and then draw again :)
10. OMG you're almost done. Now just put the tube in the head, put the head on the body, and DONE. congrats :)
Failure stories
I was ambitious, I wanted 2 different circuits for my 2 androids. 1 with usb adapter, 1 was supposed to be with a switch screwed into the back and operated by battery. But for a LED of ~3V, I needed a battery of at least 3V, and AAA and AA definitely didn't fit in the android body. I probably could have found some camera battery but it would've been hard to find the adapter for that (I definitely didn't see it at radio shack and I was pretty impatient). So I went with a coin battery (exactly 3V) that barely fit into the body. I didn't need a resistor, and I played around with some switches I bought on Amazon. It worked really well :) I drilled tiny holes into the back of the body, I bought some tiny screws & washers from radio shack and successfully installed my switch on the back of the android body.
And here's where I went wrong - firstly, I bought super thick fat red wires that wouldn't bend very well to connect all the parts. Originally, I thought I would keep the wires long so when the time came to switch batteries, you can easily pull out the battery adapter, and replace it way outside of the body. However, because of the rigidity and length of the wires, they wouldn't even fit inside the android. So I broke apart the circuit and redid everything with really thin and flimsy wires, great! But even then, because there were so many exposed metal connections (I was too lazy to buy some wire tape) in such an enclosed space, the LED would randomly turn on because some metal connections were touching. And also to increase my unhappiness, the battery was squashed at the very bottom of the body, underneath all the wires - very hard to take out. I think if this were a project for myself, I would've been okay with this quality. But it was a gift and I couldn't envision my recipient having to struggle with this battery shit - so I went with double usb figures... le sigh :'( Also by this time, the ink on the body of the android was starting to get scratched from all my configurations and attempts.
Casualties of war
-sewing scissors
-eyebrow tweezer
-coffee table scratches
I ended up using a total of 3.2 figures to complete 2 figures
-lost an arm as I yanked too hard and it fell somewhere behind the couch :(
-experimented on 1 head to see the effects of sharpie on paint and the effects of paint in general
-experimented on 1 body to see how the white paper sticky would look, ended up peeling it off and removing sticky residue with nail polish remover.
-1 "completed" body with battery circuit (I guess I'll keep this one for myself)
Overall, I thought I was pretty lucky in my experimentation - most things went right, and I only fucked up at the end. I was really happy with the results and hopefully gift recipients will be too :) If you have any questions about details, you can comment below or try me at bunnygurl184 (at) gmail (dot) com.
Tools & materials needed:
VERY IMPORTANT: get a hand-held rotary tool (see step #1 below for more details) with at least a grinder, a sander, a cutter wheel, and a drill in the kit (highly recommend this one)
1-4 DIY blank android mini figures (depends on how much you think you will fuck up), at least they are cheap!
Projector dome (I got both the milky way and spiral galaxy)
1 soldering iron (+soldering materials, you can buy a cheap kit from Amazon for ~$12)
1-3 micro usb (female) adapters (again, maybe you will fuck up? ^^;)
a bushel of resistors (I got a variety pack from radio shack)
some white LEDs (I got some IL051 3V clear white LEDs from Amazon)
Acrylic paint in silver, copper, and optionally gold, a really nice size 2 and size 8 paint brush
Sticky clear paper
Blue sharpie (or if you have a steady hand and a lot of patience, blue acrylic paint)
Painters tape
Super strong glue (I used "liquid nails")
Nail polish remover (when you need to correct your paint mistakes)
Steps:
1. After your projector dome arrives in the mail, dismantle the ball and take out the "projector" part, which consists of a plastic tube with a few lenses stuck in the middle of a big flat plastic wheel. Proceed to "free" the tube from the wheel. For the first projector dome, all I had were some sewing scissors and a tiny handrill. I basically hacked at the plastic wheel and drilled holes into it for 3+ hours until I got the sides of the tube down to smooth, but I realized I still needed to sand it (since it was still tremendously lumpy) so it was at that moment, I did most genius thing of the whole project - I went on amazon and bought a hand-held rotary tool. Also at this point, my scissors broke and my drill stopped working... For the second projector dome, the whole process only took me < 15 min with the rotary tool (I used the wheel cutter and then the sander).
2. Draw a nice hole in the android head where you want the projector to stick out and carve out the hole. Make sure the top of the tube you sanded fits in the hole.
3. You also need to grind/sand the bottom of the head so that the projector tube fits snugly in the head (normally, the hole at the bottom of the android head is WAY small). See the pictures in the previously linked blog for more details if you need it.
At this point, you can do several things in parallel or while you wait for purchases from Amazon to arrive :) So in no particular order...
4. Complete the LED circuit - I used a micro USB female adapter as a power source. I bought some long cable on amazon and hacked the plastic apart with kitchen scissors (RIP fancy sewing scissors) and thankfully, the wires were nicely intact, so I soldered the + wire to my resistor, the resistor to the + side of the LED, and the - side of the LED to the ground wire of the 5-pin micro usb. I'm too lazy to draw a circuit diagram but its pretty simple, I think you can figure it out :) the voltage of usb is usually 4.5-5.5V so I went with (5.5V - 3.2V) / 0.02 = 115 ohms (the closest higher resistor I had was 120 ohm, which was brown red brown gold. voila~
This was my practice circuit with a 9V battery and crappy yellow LED from radio shack
and a nice pile of stripped plastic on the right
For my second android, I didn't have another long wire usb adapter. I had these tiny female micro to male USB adapters, so I stripped the plastic, only to have the wires connected to the 5-pins fall off :( So then I just soldered my stuff directly to the left-most and right-most pins (you can look up online which one is + and which one is ground)... and it WORKED! awesomeness :D
If you want an alternate approach using a switch & battery (the blog I followed also tried this alternate approach), you can refer to the very end of this post about my "failure" attempts. The circuit definitely worked and it looked pretty cool in the android but it wasn't "production" quality and I grossly miscalculated the size of the battery... sadness. I think the usb method is easier though...
5. Drill hole in the foot of the android and shape it with a grinder so that it can house the micro usb.
6. Paint the bottom of the android and the rim of the head copper. I used acrylic paint but without any primer cuz I was lazy. Did about 4-5 coats each :) acrylic paint dries fast. It helps if you have a good brush, the hairs on the first brush I used kept falling off and mixing into the paint - super pain in the ass to get off as the paint is drying. Whenever I fucked up, I used a q-tip with nail polish remover to gently wipe some paint off. It worked pretty well.
7. Print the body of the android (very grateful that the original blog post had this nice template) on the clear sticky paper. I actually experimented with both white sticky and clear sticky paper. The white didn't look as good - you can check for yourself if you don't believe my picture below :) Cut out the sticky and paste it onto the body. I did some ad-hoc designs on the arms (cut out random rectangles and paste). However, the sticky paper didn't stick so well on such a small circumference and the ends kept peeling back so I had to use some clear tape to hold them in place. The sheen of the clear sticky paper is really nice but my only complaint about it is that the ink can be scratched off pretty easily. I would definitely not categorize the android as weather-hardy or tumble resistant. Be careful about scratching it up :O
Left: white sticky paper vs Right: clear sticky paper
8. Glue the usb adapter into the foot (my liquid nails glue is really strong, but took 24 hours to fully dry). I used eyebrow tweezer to place it into the foot. Now it has glue on the tips, RIP eyebrow tweezer :(
9. Paint the head - I gave it about 4 coats of silver paint, painted on the circles with gold paint, and drew the rest of the squares by hand using a blue sharpie (with strips of painters tape for straight line guidance). I think you have a steady hand and go about it very slowly, you can accomplish the same with a precision paintbrush and blue acrylic paint. But I love my sharpie art and I feel a lot more confident using it and I didn't want to paint 4 coats of blue paint so I went with my option. Btw, did you know there's oil based sharpies for drawing on wood and plastic? Too bad I didn't see it on Google Shopping Express until I finished drawing.
PS, if you fuck up a little with the sharpie, you can paint more silver over it and then draw again :)
10. OMG you're almost done. Now just put the tube in the head, put the head on the body, and DONE. congrats :)
Failure stories
I was ambitious, I wanted 2 different circuits for my 2 androids. 1 with usb adapter, 1 was supposed to be with a switch screwed into the back and operated by battery. But for a LED of ~3V, I needed a battery of at least 3V, and AAA and AA definitely didn't fit in the android body. I probably could have found some camera battery but it would've been hard to find the adapter for that (I definitely didn't see it at radio shack and I was pretty impatient). So I went with a coin battery (exactly 3V) that barely fit into the body. I didn't need a resistor, and I played around with some switches I bought on Amazon. It worked really well :) I drilled tiny holes into the back of the body, I bought some tiny screws & washers from radio shack and successfully installed my switch on the back of the android body.
And here's where I went wrong - firstly, I bought super thick fat red wires that wouldn't bend very well to connect all the parts. Originally, I thought I would keep the wires long so when the time came to switch batteries, you can easily pull out the battery adapter, and replace it way outside of the body. However, because of the rigidity and length of the wires, they wouldn't even fit inside the android. So I broke apart the circuit and redid everything with really thin and flimsy wires, great! But even then, because there were so many exposed metal connections (I was too lazy to buy some wire tape) in such an enclosed space, the LED would randomly turn on because some metal connections were touching. And also to increase my unhappiness, the battery was squashed at the very bottom of the body, underneath all the wires - very hard to take out. I think if this were a project for myself, I would've been okay with this quality. But it was a gift and I couldn't envision my recipient having to struggle with this battery shit - so I went with double usb figures... le sigh :'( Also by this time, the ink on the body of the android was starting to get scratched from all my configurations and attempts.
Casualties of war
-sewing scissors
-eyebrow tweezer
-coffee table scratches
I ended up using a total of 3.2 figures to complete 2 figures
-lost an arm as I yanked too hard and it fell somewhere behind the couch :(
-experimented on 1 head to see the effects of sharpie on paint and the effects of paint in general
-experimented on 1 body to see how the white paper sticky would look, ended up peeling it off and removing sticky residue with nail polish remover.
-1 "completed" body with battery circuit (I guess I'll keep this one for myself)
Overall, I thought I was pretty lucky in my experimentation - most things went right, and I only fucked up at the end. I was really happy with the results and hopefully gift recipients will be too :) If you have any questions about details, you can comment below or try me at bunnygurl184 (at) gmail (dot) com.