LEGO Iron Man Costume
| For Tidewater Comicon 2019 I wanted to make a more elaborate costume. I didn’t want something simple like light up eyes. I wanted something with moving parts and sound. With Avengers Endgame coming out, I thought this would be a good time to do Iron Man. | ||
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| I started with the normal LEGO head and started to build the helmet around the head. The inner head base has the face of Tony Stark. The outer face plate lifts up to reveal Tony’s face and then closes. | ||
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| To figure out position of the motor and the pivot points to lift the face plate, I made a mockup of the profile of the helmet with paper and cardboard. I then adjusted the pivot points to figure out how to lift the face plate the way I wanted. | ||
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| Although I experimented with the pivot points on my cardboard mockup, it still took a few days to tweak the final placement of the motor, pivoting arms, and face plate to get it to line up with the rest of the helmet. In my search for electronics for this project, I found flat LED backlights at adafruit.com that worked perfectly for the eyes of Iron Man. | ||
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| I used a small strip of LEDs to light up the arc reactor in his chest. I put in some aluminum foil to help reflect the light more and cover it with a piece of translucent foam (like Shazam) to diffuse the light. This was powered by 8 AA batteries. | ||
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| I wanted to add repulsor lights in the hands with sound effects. I ran out of time for the sound but I did add lights to the costumes. Previous costumes used my son’s plain hands. This time I wanted to make something that looked like LEGO hands. Using a larger diameter PVC pipe, I created the inner curve of the LEGO hand. I then covered the hand in foam like a mitten to get the LEGO hand shape. With a firm PVC base, I could add a light ring to the hand. | ||
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I added a microcontroller in the helmet that receives a signal from a key fob that my daughter controlled. Pressing one button would cause the eye lights to go out and the faceplate to light up. Pressing another button caused the faceplate to come down and the eyes to power up. Unfortunately when the above video was captured, the wiring for the repulsor lights in the hands had come loose.
