Progress on Futuristic Mask

This week I have been able to make some solid progress on my magnetic levitation module. I bought a diy magnetic levitation kit from Etsy for this project. Would not exactly recommend this as a strategy as there is critical IC labeling info missing and no assembly or schematic provided so I’ve had to do a lot of reverse engineering. It looks awesome though. 

This project involved attaching many transistors to SMT heat-sinks. It was quite challenging to get the heatsinks hot enough to melt solder without damaging the transistors with the heat gun. Several burnt out and needed to be replaced leading to delays in the development process.

In order to tune the circuit I had remove the jumper flags and place a DMM in the current path. By adjusting the potentiometers until current was near zero in this path I was able to adjust the baseline level for coil current.

A primary focus of this project was on power. I wanted the object to be battery powered at first because I though this enhanced the futuristic illusion. I user a 3D printed battery case to allow the user to toggle power on and off, and the baseline tuning to minimize coil current when no magnet is present. This PCB  required 12V and up to 2A. Initially I connected a 9V and 3V Lithium battery in series. However, the current draw was too much. The link below shows the brief moment before the batteries were drained.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A56-dPNv2LLQ1yJsyl7fQy_Kav35Iqge/view?usp=sharing

In order to characterize the real power consumption of the system I connected it to a benchtop supply and monitored the current, I found that it spikes at around 1A when trying to center the object. The item functioned well with a 12V DC wall jack, but I wanted it to be portable. In the future I would need to replace them with 3S LiPo battery or 3 x 18650 cells with a BMS

I love the way that a complex and intricate electronic circuit looks, and I’m seriously considering making the enclosure a clear acrylic rather than a black PLA enclosure. Please let me know if you think it would be cool in the comments. My only concern is that exposed electronic circuits look more like the 1990s retrofuturism aesthetic where clear plastic devices were popular. I’m aiming for current futurism as opposed to the imagined future of past generations. 

Credit: Fast Company

That being said the more I look at clear electronics such as the ones above, the more into this I become. In addition I have purchased a blender model for the mask which I’ll be augmenting for my use case. I’m changing the Japanese text at the bottom from saying “All Hail Letouce” to “All Hail Dr. Coffman” as an inside joke because my boyfriend is entering a PhD program this fall. This required isolating the text object in Blender. In addition I changed the base of the helmet to hold a magnet with glue on the attachment point. Because the design didn’t require all the bells and whistles of SolidWorks I chose Blender to make my life easier.