TimelINE

Took final video of the genji sword.

Spray painted the plexiglass with metallizer. The LED light is still not being displayed well, but it definitely seems better some how. We tried to make the sword blade stronger when picking it up from the handle, but the plexiglass just added a lot of weight.

Finally, we glued the blade with plexiglass to the the rest of the sword and handle.

Our project is basically finished from this point on.

Submitted project printout. Found an audio file we liked. Paint touchups on the sword.

We found out that for a top view the sword, the LED shines straight through perfectly. Light is just not being caught within the plexiglass from a side view. We decided to sandpaper more plexiglass to provide support, but also give more of a chance to diffuse on the sides, we plan to also try the metallizer on the plexiglass.

In the morning, the paint was dried and we added so detail colored paint.

In the makerspace we wood glued the sword pieces, both plexiglass and foam, together. This was very tedious and took hours. In the end, unfortunately the LED did not shine through the cloudy plexiglass as we would have hoped. We tried to sand the plexiglass surface more but that did not change anything. Additionally, the sword was floppy when raised horizontally. Options we could think of are: add more plexiglass on the sides to provide horizontal support and to create more space for any LED light to go through. We suspect that part of the issue also had to do with the LED being too spaced out.

Our soldered wire on our speaker also snapped so we soldered that again. Still struggling to find a good audio file. We did however, successfully combine the code between the accelerometer + speaker and the LED display modes.

A LOT of crafting going on. We used a utility knife to cut out the craft foam traces, and strong scissors to cut out the plexiglass pieces, then sanded it. We also used a heat gun to close the pores of the foam pieces we cut out.

Successfully played a sound through the speaker (activated by the accelerometer). Now we need to find the perfect audio file that fits both in ESP32 memory and can play through the speaker.

Later, we used our metallizer plastidip to coat the foam pieces. Unfortunately, the plastidip was did not have the silver color we were looking for, and was more clear with a bunch of glitter in it. After doing a few coats, the foam was not as stiff as we had hoped for either. We ended up doing a few coats of regular glue to prime the foam for painting, and also had a hardness to it.

Around midnight, we started to paint the main colors onto the sword.

Metallizer plastidip package arrived from Amazon.

Got accelerometer to play notes through the speaker, now the challenge is to make it sound similar to the sound of a lightsaber or something along those lines with a very small audio file that can be stored in the ESP32's mem.

Made another stencil for the blade. Traced all stencils onto craft foam and plexiglass.

Successful made power switch that plugs into the ESP32 using a 9V battery instead of 2 AA batteries.

Goals: cut all craft foam and plexiglass parts, heat gun the foam to close pores, merge LED and accelerometer code into one upload file, play a sound file through the speaker

After that: plastidipping foam parts, wood glue parts altogether, 

Got readings on accelerometer (problem was with wiring to ESP32). Might need to change from playing a sound to just affecting the LED display in its own light mode due to time. But, we will see.

Finished template on Genji Sword. Need to trace this on foam and plexiglass then cut out.

Also ordered some plastidip to firm up the foam and give it the silver shine.

Completed

• LED display (4 light modes)

• Power circuity (switch activated battery powers ESP32 on/off)

In Progress

• Accelerometer takes reading to amplify speaker audio effect (done in 1-2 days)

• Speaker to play sort of a light saber buzzing sound (done in 2-4 days)

• Craft the physical sword (done in a week)

• Website doing well, added images/video throughout this timeline (done in a week)

Reach

• Switch ESP32 to Nano Arduino (if everything goes according to plan this will be easy to do)

• Craft a sheath (most likely not getting here)

Changes: no more reed switch to power on/off the ESP32
Difficulties: accelerometer is not taking in any readings, getting art supplies for sword such as paint and strong foam glue.

Soldered battery holder (2 aa batteries) to a switch. Also soldered wires to extend wires.

Fiddled around with accelerometer.

Asked Mike from Makerspace about hardware, also retrieved 100 grit sandpaper for plexiglass. We tested that this was our desired grit. We also tested that the shears cut plexiglass well.

LED: fixed bug with pulsing LED, added static light mode, and combined BUTTON0 (turn off/on) and BUTTON1 (display mode) purposes into one.

Speaker: soldered wires to speaker (+ or - does not really matter apparently, but orient it the same when using multiple speakers) We plan to record some extremely small sized audio file (almost like lightsaber static noises) that can be saved into the Arduino memory without additional memory needed, need to look up the library for this.

Switch: retrieved additional parts for switch that allowed us to screw it in place. Learned that when the switch is flipped to the left, the bottom right two are connected. When the switch is flipped to the right, the bottom left two are connected. This can help us short circuit for powering purposes.

Button: switched out the previous button with no feedback, to one with feedback. We plan to replace the usage of ESP32 BUTTONS with this single button.

Learned how to solder (first time) in course Lab. Used this opportunity to solder wires to the LED strip. A soldering mistake led us to remove 1 LED from the strip, decreasing LED count from 60 to 59.

Fiddled with all hardware components, notably the LED strip and accelerometer. 

LED: We figured out the LED strip we had used the NeoPixel library. We successfully were able to program LED light modes: on/off, theatre chase, and pulsing (still bugged in the end). Using BUTTON0 we can turn on/off the LED; using BUTTON1 we can switch LED light display mode (theatre chase or pulsing).

Accelerometer: We have some sample code to use, but overall the accelerometer was not giving us any directional readings.

Researched about how to program and connect hardware to Arduino.  In the end, we decided to remove the reed sensor because it was not what we imagined it to be (not strong enough magnet).

Our game plan is as follows:
LED -> Power Button/Switch -> Accelerometer -> Speaker -> Nano Arduino conversion -> Crafts

Amazon order arrived.