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.”
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, 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 is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
