Skip to main content

Atlanta Cosplay Meetup: Group Build Update #2

 The Atlanta Cosplay Meetup has been making a ton of progress on our Marines & Xenos group costume. We have finished up build day #6 so let's take a look and see where things are at currently!

We've finished principal construction of the Marine torso armor and are working on finishing it currently. The cardboard masters were coated in fiberglass resin to give them strength, and we are going over them with bondo body filler to smooth them out. After a few more passes they should be smooth enough to use as vacuumforming masters, or to mold and cast in resin and fiberglass mat for strength.








We've also started building the leg armor, using the same method as the torso.




All that is left for the Marine armor is to 3D print the shoulder parts, and the helmet and various attachments. Adam purchased the same WWII helmet used in the film, which will become the base for our helmet that we will make out of cast resin and fiberglass mat.


The Pulse Rifle has been assembled and had a first pass of smoothing and cleanup done on it. The entire gun was 3D printed from a high detail model from the game Aliens: Colonial Marines. Another day or so of work and we'll be ready to mold it in silicone!





Adam Keeton lent a hand helping us lathe a test Grenade out of aluminum. This is only a first iteration, we'll need to make a few adjustments and go back and try again. So far the results are very nice looking though!




Plus, he looks like a natural holding the Pulse Rifle.



The Xeno skull has been started. We built the head using a 3D model from the game Aliens: Colonial Marines and a program called 123D Make. What this program can do is generate a 3D interlocking puzzle, sort of like the wooden dinosaur skeleton puzzles you got as a kid. We can set it to be however many vertical and horizontal slices and the program draws up plans, which we then exported to the laser cutter. 4 hours of cutting and about 60 pieces later, you get this mess.



Assembly really is a simple as finding the numbered slots and sliding them together. Once you get the first couple of pieces put together the assembly is a breeze. We took maybe an hour to put the whole thing together. Once it was assembled, we coated the whole thing in fiberglass resin to give it strength, and once that cured we filled all of the holes with expanding foam.





Once the foam cures, we will rasp all of the excess off and skin it in bondo, and use that for our sculpting base.

Valentin is working on the mechanism for the Xeno tongue. We are 3D designing and printing a rack and pinion gear under tension from a rubber band, and "cocked" with a worm gear connected to a motor. The idea is that the Xeno costumers will have a hidden button to open the mouth and shoot out the tongue via pressure from the band, and the worm gear will retract and cock the tongue to be shot out again.



Lastly, I started on the Smartgun for my own Marine costume. Every Colonial Marine group needs a Smartgunner, and I would be lying if I didn't say that Vasquez was a bit of a hero as a kid. The Smartgun and the steadicam arm will be built much the way the rest of the build has been, with several 3D printed parts and laser cut cardboard details. The steadicam arm will have a semi-working interior using custom machined aluminum parts and springs. So far the barrel has been cut and printed, with a few more parts on the way.



That's all for now. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to our deadline in May!

See all of our progress photos on Freeside's Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1045223078825003.1073741829.612557732091542&type=1

Be apart of the Atlanta Cosplay Meetup by keeping an eye on Freeside's Meetup calendar, or our Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AtlantaCosplayMeetup/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Capacitive-Touch Janko Keyboard: What I Did at the 2017 Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon

Last weekend (February 10-12, 2017) I made a Janko-layout capacitive-touch keyboard for the Moog Werkstatt at the Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon. The day after (Monday the 13th), I made this short video of the keyboard being played: "Capacitive Touch Janko Keyboard for Moog Werkstatt" (Text from the video doobly doo) This is a Janko-layout touch keyboard I made at the 2017 Moog Hackathon at Georgia Tech, February 10-12. I'm playing a few classic bass and melody lines from popular and classic tunes. I only have one octave (13 notes) connected so far. The capacitive touch sensors use MPR121 capacitive-touch chips, on breakout boards from Adafruit (Moog Hackathon sponsor Sparkfun makes a similar board for the same chip). The example code from Adafruit was modified to read four boards (using the Adafruit library and making four sensor objects and initializing each to one of the four I2C addresses is remarkably easy for anyone with moderate familiarity with C++), and

Freesiders Hackers Collaborate in Medical / Surgical Research

Published in the May issue of the Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery : " A Novel Combination of Printed 3-Dimensional Anatomic Templates and Computer-assisted Surgical Simulation for Virtual Preoperative Planning in Charcot Foot Reconstruction ." This collaboration of specialties represents an undertaking by members of Freeside Atlanta , Southern Arizona Limb Salvage Alliance , and The Podiatry Institute .  Charcot foot reconstruction remains on of the most challenging procedures in foot and ankle surgery.  These procedures are often lengthy procedures which can be riddled with complications. With the help of Freeside Atlanta Members, institutional researchers used open source Osirix Image viewer and 3D Software such as Newtek's Lightwave or Blender to create simulated surgical reductions as well as 3D printed templates.  Freeside Atlanta members assisted in providing 3D printing solutions and know-how to the project. Experimental test prints were done on a M

Onboard Firmware of the Human Brain

Freesiders are continually tinkering with robotics and other such machinery .  Many of these embedded processors and firmware are becoming open source and every-more diversified in the wake of the modern Maker movement . One notable boost to the hackerspace arsenal is the Arduino (an like platforms).  This offers designers an incredible power to devise not just individual devices but even the emergence of complex, integrated systems . This evolutionary pace of modern technological systems may be significantly faster the biologic system development, but there may be a few well learned tricks yet to be mastered.  It seems that studying how nature has managed to solve many development challenges will aid in designing robotics, where efficiently counts just as much. One  challenge, that is particularly interesting, is data processing.  Artificial intelligence is labored with processing data and producing a meaningful and useful output.  When considering the increase in sensory