For my build I tried to do an LED kit for Aerial.
I got off to a great start designing the eyes, and then I unfortunately got stuck for hardware reasons. I got my friend Vi to print the eyes, and you’ve got a picture of the test print here, but we never got final clear eyes because her printer broke down before we got the transparent resin, and wasn’t repaired all month. That first test print doesn’t quite fit (my design was off by exactly 1mm, the measurement was correct but was implemented wrong.)
So no glowing eyes. There’s a few more things I needed for the head anyway that I didn’t figure out, but this was a good lesson in “you actually can just use calipers to measure a part and design a usable CAD model.” Once we finish debugging this I’ll publish the model if anyone else wants replacement eyes for Aerial.
Because I got hung up on eyes (and early in the month was more confident Vi would repair her 3d printer) I moved over to the ν Gundam to do some experimentation. That comes with translucent eyes, and as you can see in the first picture, the LEDs I ordered fit inside the head cavity.
I didn’t have soldering equipment when I started, I had a combo of getting it shipped from back home, and buying a few other tools as I needed them. Here you can see I did a mediocre job hand-soldering this LED (which is supposed to be surface mount). I need more practice and better holding tools.
In the next picture, you can see my first forays into modding structure—this is the inner frame of the chest, entirely hidden within the armor, I’m making space to put an LED underneath the chest camera. I used a hobby knife to slowly cut away at that spot, and hand-turned a drill bit to punch through the back wall. This lets the LED just barely fit in place.
I’m still having lots of issues with shorting, so I’m gonna need to learn some new techniques to deal with that. Right now I’m using tape as insulation, heat shrink might work better but I need small enough heat shrink tubing (the smallest I can buy locally is twice as big as these wires need). I also might need thinner wires to do this properly.
I did a bit of hand painting here. The eyes are a solid clear piece so I painted black around them—this is slightly messy and not completely opaque, I'm not sure it looks better than unpainted because of the unevenness 😓 I also painted the inside of some white parts to make them more opaque, which worked perfectly well. Not visible at all, and that's the point.
