ReactorX- The Arc Reactor from the movies

12 Mar 2016 Tweet Pune, India

Who does not like Iron Man? Who does not like to be like him? I wanted to do a gig at the ComicCon Delhi a while back and who else could i be, the Iron Man. He is fundamentally the coolest engineer/maker around, at-least in the movies.

The defining thing with Iron Man is his “Arc Reactor” ; it gives him strength and he made it himself (Sorry Ivan Vanko). Obviously, to impersonate him, I would need one. So, I decided to build one using our friendly of-the-shelf micro-controller, the MSP430. I called it the ArcReactorX. (Probably because I like X-men too)

The arcReactorX is a wearable arc reactor clone which runs on a Li-Ion Battery from an old cell phone! It has 8 Blue LEDs on the circumference and a bright white LED in the centre.

Features:

• Small and light
• Power efficient
• Bright
• Change-able modes using a switch
• Since, it has a battery, we need a battery indicator like a dial on the reactor.So if its 50% charged we light up only half of it. Follow the discharge graphs for more accuracy!
• Morse Code for SOS
• A mind blowing start-up sequence
• Knight rider effect on LEDs
• Breathing effect on the Middle high power LED

It also needs to be wearable and comfortable at the same time.

The motion and the light helps attract attention.

I designed, etched and soldered the board around a TSSOP MSP430G2452. Complete and elaborate logs available on my hackaday.io profile.

Added a test-code for the start-up sequence, i.e. when you turn it on for the first time

I added a velcro based strap on so i can just strap the reactor on my Tshirt and then wear another one on the top to hide it and turn it on.

The TL-DR; video is here (please pardon me for the weird psychedelic audio) :

Interested in building one too ? Grab the schematics and code from here.

Cheers,

Rohit