If you’re planning to build an electronic sword to go with your cosplay, look no further than the Adafruit shop for everything you need. Nefeni Cosplay is currently working on replicating the Transistor Sword from the Transistor video game and is using Arduino for the first time to bring Red’s sword to life with lights and sound. She laid out her plans for the sword in the Adafruit forums, and forum user joshuakane jumped in to share information about the parts he used to make Transistor Sword – he took a slightly different approached and used Trinkets:
“I put most of the electronics in the sword handle, placing the speakers in the the triangle shaped hilt. I also used two strips of the NeoPixels so the light was really bright and dispersed outward from the center of the sword.
My setup was a 3.3v Trinket pro with a battery backpack. I included programming to allow button pushes from the Trinket to trigger light and sound events. This was done using the serial interface of the Audio FX board, as opposed to the button push functionality on the AudioFX board.
I also added an Accelerometer that is triggered by motion events. This allows for the “battle sounds” you mentioned.
In addition I added a barrel adapter that connected to the battery backpack, and utilized the switch capability of the backpack to allow the internal battery to be recharged without opening up the sword.”
You can see the finished product in the above photo with his friend Grace as Red. The non-electronic parts of the sword were designed by Sean Bradley and “made from vacuformed plastic, PVC and some welded metal parts.”