Week 12 at last. Only 4 more weeks to go, and I’m very excited to continue from last week, so let’s get right into it.
Follow the Light
A quick update before anything else though, I plugged Hahli in and left her light on over the weekend to stress test her light to make sure it wouldn’t fail on me at all, and thankfully, the light was just as bright as when I plugged her in. So thankfully, the resistors are doing their job in preventing the LEDs from burning out.
With that being said, let’s continue with the rest of the Toa. I chose Hewkii to be up next, just to work left from right. It took quite a bit of finagling to get the LED block to fit in his axe properly, but I eventually managed to reach a middle ground where, ideally, the LED block will flex into place. I also did a pretty poor job with soldering his cables, making a bit of a mess. But it did work.
Continuing the order from left to right, Matoro is up next.
His sword definitely gave me a bit of trouble, trying to get the wires to fit in. It did also open my eyes to a quite critical flaw in my LED block design. When the block sits on top of the lid, it actually ends up being just very slightly too tall for the battery compartment. This is why I had trouble with Hewkii’s axe as well, and why I had to squish the back plate down for Matoro as well just now.
Since I already have all of the blocks printed, I can’t say it’s worth reprinting them just for a slight height decrease, but if I truly cannot fit the block into one of the Toa’s swords, I’ll consider it.
Regardless, I continued with Matoro and soldered his wires together without incident.
I also found some thin silver wire that was part of some separate LED lights here in the DKC that happened to serve as a great way to replace the jumper cables to tie the lighting cables down to the Toa. From here on out, I used that wire instead of jumper cables.
However, one thing I took noticed of was that I would have a lot of trouble identifying whose cable is whose. I’ve already been using color coordinated cables, but the actual plugs directly underneath the Toa are still black and red, so I quickly just put some masking tape around each cable and wrote the respective Toa’s name on it.
With Matoro done, it’s up next to Nuparu.
His drill was particularly tricky to figure out where to put the holes. The best spot to do so would be on the underside of it, where the handle is, but due to how it’s shaped, his hand takes up the entire spot and leaves no room for cables to be routed. I thought of making holes in the battery compartment, but I’m almost certain that would bring a bunch of unforeseen issues, so I decided against it.
Instead, I opted to put holes on the top of the drill, where they could unfortunately be seen quite easily, but it was the best compromise I could make.
His process went the smoothest of any of the Toa so far, for the most part.
However, I couldn’t help but notice that his light was noticeably dimmer than the rest of the Toa, even compare to Hewkii’s. I believe this is due to me soldering the two red LED resistors on top of each other, and then on top of the power cord. So while Hewkii might only have the effects of one resistor, Nuparu probably is suffering from having the power of two resistors together, making his light dim.
So, I went back to the circuit board and tried to resolder to fix this issue. It took a good minute of reorganizing a ton of wires, but I managed to successfully get everything properly routed.
However, it didn’t seem to make any change in Nuparu’s light, leading me to believe it’s either something about his drill, whether it’s the way it faces or the tube being less transparent than the others, or that it’s the LED itself. Regardless, I want to move on and at least give the light a minute to “warm up”, so to speak, before I decide to replace it or anything.
Kongu would be next, but I want to wait a bit for him, given his unique situation, so I’ll skip ahead to Jaller.
His sword uniquely had an issue where some of the green light leaked through the front side, just above the button. I’ve never noticed this before, and I have no clue if it’s in the OEM light, but either way, I quickly solved the issue by putting some black electrical tape on the problem area.
The rest of the wiring process went fine.
This now leaves just Kongu left. He’s going to be a bit awkward to deal with just because he isn’t screwed in yet, but the process will mostly stay the same.
That being said, his crossbow immediately gave me a few issues. He shares the same problems that Nuparu and Jaller both had, where there isn’t a great spot to drill holes for the wires, and with the light leakage.
Thankfully, because his crossbow handle has a bit more space than Nuparu’s drill did, I was able to drill some holes from the inside of the battery compartment, and route the wires through them. The light leakage problem was also easily solved with black tape again.
After that, it was smooth sailing for the rest of him. Although, I opted to leave his cable dangling for now until I was 100% certain on where his final position would be within the board.
Establishing Boundaries
While I do still need to attach a button to the circuit board, I want to wait on that before working with it. The next thing I want to do is start making the iconic chain-link fence I’ve talked about so much.
For this, I’ll use some armature wire with an appropriate thickness. I don’t really have a plan on what to do beyond that, so I just decided to look at some reference images, and just try my best with it.
Try as I might though, I couldn’t seem to make anything out of it, and it was made very apparent that I had not a single clue of what I was doing. I couldn’t find any guides or tutorials on how to do this online, so I reverted back to asking Chat GPT for advice.
It originally suggested that I try a method of wrapping the wire around an object like a pencil to create a coil of sorts, and then to intertwine the coils together, which would work if I could easily twist the wire. Unfortunately though, it’s just too thick for that, so I had to reconsider.
I tried a few other methods, from trying to create individual loops to link together, to tying zig-zagged pieced of wire together, but every idea suffered from the issue of the wire being too difficult to bend, and even more difficult to bend into even shapes that would properly fit together.
I about gave up for the week, but I decided to ask GPT one more time if it could share some more video guides. While the advice it gave along with the guides didn’t really help me all that much, one of the videos suddenly made everything click.
Specifically, I saw this one by Sofia Bue on YouTube, detailing how to twist armature wire together for clay sculpting. I initially brushed it off since she was using much, much thinner wire than me, but there was one specific part of her method that opened my eyes.
About 40 seconds in or so, she showcases using a drill to twist the wire together, and the way she shows to do it is by taking one long wire that is folded in half on itself, rather than something like two wires put together and twisted at one end.
I very quickly realized that this could work for me as well. While the wire would still take effort to bend into shape, it would be much, much easier to keep the shape even.
I put it into practice, taking one lone strip of wire, folding it in half, making sure to keep a circular shape, and kept twisting it together, creating a general chain-link fence look.
It’s not perfect, but I’m confident it’s the best I’ll be able to get with the tools available to me.
But, once I have one link of the fence, I can modify it to look more damaged and busted by snipping some parts off, and then I can link multiple of these links together using a small piece of wire, which gets me a pretty good look, in my opinion.
It still hurts my hands a ton, even when using pliers to help shape it all, but I’m still glad to have found a solution. I made a few more of these links and set them aside, as I am unfortunately out of time for this week.
Moving Forward
First of all, I apologize for the rather light post this week. I had been very focused on being so hands on with the lights that I somewhat neglected to write this, although I also feel like there wasn’t much to write about, given how repetitive the tasks were.
I was also not a fan of how long it took me to complete the Toa’s lights this week. Due to some personal plans and obligations, I only managed to complete one each day, until Thursday in which I finished up Kongu.
Due to the time it took, I didn’t have enough to spare to work on this armature wire and discover the solution I did, which means I was unable to paint the foam base, so I am unfortunately behind schedule. This is also not to mention that I still need to work on the button function for the lights.
I only have three weeks left to complete this, so I really need to speed things up. Next week, I’ll apply the chain-link fence, and then paint the base after removing the fence and Toa temporarily. While I wait for the layers to dry, I’ll continue to work on a few designs including a button, some way to store the circuit board underneath the display, and some minor changes to the platform raisers on each corner of the base.
Once I have the paint put on, and I’ve printed out my various designs, I’ll shift focus to the Plexiglass and start working out how to apply it to the display. All of this will almost certainly take up the whole week.
But after that, I will also need to start creating the banner decal I want to wrap around the display. Currently, I’m still waiting to hear back from one group on campus who has a viable printer that I may be able to use. I must find the measurements before going all in on a design.
Ideally, this will be done in two weeks, but I am fully expecting that to just be blind optimism, given how there’s definitely so many other issues that will, without question, show up while getting all this done. I will just have to see.