Are you on a budget but have plenty of time and patience? Then you can use pop tabs to construct armor. RPF forum user PoptabArtist has constructed armor from the material before, and she uses a method that combines the pop tabs with chainmail rings. First, she plotted out a pattern. Then, the tedious work starts. And all of the work on this build seems to fall into that category – but look how neat it appears! She paints the pop tabs in sections. For example, when she started the leg pieces, she painted almost 200 pop tabs yellow. Then she laid them out and started connecting them with jump rings. Wow.
She started on the Iron Man build in June 2013 and has been posting progress on the RPF and Facebook. You can see many more photos there and marvel at how far the suit has come. Also, you can examine her method and work on your own set of pop tab armor!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
The top looks like protective gear for American football.