The movie Tron: Ares released recently, and we watched Tron: Legacy in advance to pump ourselves up, then went out to see Ares in theaters. I really liked it, and thought the costumes, music, sets, and action were great. It’s sad to me that Tron movies do so poorly in the box office.
Laura and I both wanted to do Tron costumes for Halloween. The first question was how to light it. I wasn’t a fan of EL wire, as it’s very dim and doesn’t look good. EL panel was super expensive, and my past experience with LED strip lights was not great as the density is pretty low. However, I did find COB LED strips, which have a really high density of 400 LEDs/meter, so that it looks like a continuous strip of light. The only downside is that it’s a continuous 5mm width, and the Tron costumes are of variable width.
To simulate width, I acquired reflective tape and cut it into the right shapes. I was aiming to match the Tron: Legacy costumes of Sam Flynn and Quorra. The LED strips that I found ran off 5V, and had PWM controllers that would allow me to plug them in to a USB port and then control them. The strips were super easy to work with, and were easy to cut at 1cm intervals and solder to the pads on the back for power. I could branch off and connect them all together so that a single USB port would do the whole upper half or lower half.
From an execution standpoint, the clothing was the easy part. We acquired black tops and bottoms. My first attempt at bottoms, pleather pants, wouldn’t allow anything to stick to them. It was completely hopeless. I had to purchase some men’s leggings. For a top I had a leather jacket, and that worked out nicely. The biggest problem was that much of the fabric was stretchy, and because we wanted to re-use the clothing that meant we could only use adhesives, which don’t play nice with stretchy fabric. I got some extra strength double sided tape, which ended up working to attach the reflective tape to the clothes, but we had to wear the costumes while we put the tape and LED strips on because they needed to be stretched in the right way. So we wore our clothes and cut and attached the tape to each other, then I followed it with the LED strips down the middle of the tape, and then soldered where appropriate to get the LED strips to be powered.
The downside to this process was mechanical durability. The solder connections weren’t great, and any kind of tugging on them would rip them out. We had 3 notable failures during the evening. Fortunately the host of one event we attended had a soldering iron and we could take care of two of them, but on the third I had to pinch the joint on my costume for an hour until we left.
The far longer part of the costume assembly was the identity disc. I found a model online, and 3D printed it over the course of more than a week, cranking out part after part. The model was terrible, and had lots of assembly issues, so that I regretted not spending some time on it in advance to make sure it would print better and be easier to assemble with interlocking parts, and a way to take it apart. But I was running out of time, so I just sent it. I made two discs. They have 3D printed black ABS, and 3D printed clear PETG, glued together. I used the same COB LED strips, with a barrel jack to charge the two 380mAh LiPo batteries inside. A switch allowed me to change between the two batteries and an off state, which also allowed me to choose which battery to charge, or even power it externally for testing. I got some boost converters to go from LiPo voltage to 5V, then used one of the PWM controllers and embedded it into the disc and made it look good. The backpack was designed to have 4 small magnets that interfaced with the disc, but they weren’t strong enough, so I had to design and attach a hook that would hold the disc as well. The backpack design also didn’t have a way to attach to the shirt, so I tried stronger magnets in addition to velcro and more double sided sticky tape. It barely worked.
In the end the costume was a huge hit, but it was fragile and barely worked. We went to a party and everybody loved it, and then we went to a club and the whole club turned to admire us when we walked in, and then many people stopped us to tell us how awesome the costume was. We both have never had such cool Halloween costumes, and it was super fun. But it was also a lot of work.
