Hi all. Thought I'd share with you my modded Spirit Halloween proton pack. It's about 80% scale, which is plenty big enough for my 7-year-old son, and still looks decently sized on adults. As soon as I learned of this pack, 5-year-old me just had to get one. And I had just gotten my Arduino beginners kit a week earlier. I knew what had to be done :)
The stock lights/sounds were terrible, so I completely gutted the pack and replaced it with a custom Arduino project.
I use a single Mega2560.
It has a DFPlayer Mini MP3 player hooked up to a MAX9744 20w amplifier and speaker.
The pack and thrower each have a number of LEDs and bar LEDs. The bar LEDs are controlled by shift registers. The thrower has a 3W Pixie smart RBG LED in the barrel tip, which lights up nicely when firing. (See the video link below if interested)
The stock thrower is very small and looked pretty crap. But a friend of mine kindly 3D printed parts (designed by CountDeMonet on Thingiverse) specifically sized for this pack. So that was constructed from scratch. This turned out to be crucial. It would not have been half as good without this thrower, and I'm so grateful for their help.
After that, I made a new MDF backboard for strength, and to give it a bit more depth. I mounted an Alice pack frame. Resprayed everything and got new stickers. Added the ion arm and other cosmetics.
This was a lot of work, but I learned heaps. I knew nothing about Arduino/electronics before starting this. I made some mistakes and spent weeks trying to sort out some of the glitches, but it was all worth it. I have always wanted an unlicensed nuclear accelerator - but never imagined it would actually happen.
Image gallery of the whole process:
https://imgur.com/a/IvRlBid
Stay well.
