Hello. It's me, William Osman and today, we're gonna build a Doctor Strange spell prop thing.
I'm not really sure what it's called. Let me show you.
Hoyo-Hawah!
Just kidding. I wish it looked that good. One second
Lamp!
No!
This is what we've actually made.
It still looks pretty sweet. Not as sweet.
These are some early tests of the project. This is the very first version.
This is the the final version designed by John the Cameraguy in Illustrator. This is a reference image that we used of Benedict Cucumbersnack.
In the movie, the spell disc things or whatever they're called aren't just static images. They have a lot of animation and flickering light.
So to make this more exciting, I'm gonna try to break apart these layers into maybe four separate pieces of acrylic and use an Arduino to light them up individually.
I'm not super happy with the brightness of the geometry, so I think that by defocusing the beam, we can make those lines bigger
which will let more light out the side and hopefully that makes it brighter.
If you are not familiar, this is my home-built 80 watt laser cutter. ah, Half-finished.
At some point in the future, I will finish it and then do an overview video.
I've done a couple tests, trying to change settings. This one, I accidentally put the power on too high and cut the middle out.
But, it looks pretty good on camera. I was worried it wouldn't look that great.
I tried to make a wider path by defocusing the beam as you can see the geometry in the centre here, the paths are much wider.
But, it actually made things kind of worse.
This is the first piece. The first test piece and it look I think actually the best of everything.
I think I can get four nine inch section out of the two pieces of acrylic I have left without having to go to the store.
The only problem is, I don't think I have enough LEDs.
Here are the tiny surface-mount LEDs I'm going to use and
they're small enough to fit onto the edge of the acrylic without bleeding over into the other discs.
Here goes nothing. Hopefully the next shot isn't me buying more acrylic at the store.
Woops! A little too high of a power setting.
Uh, when I cut the other two discs, I'll turn the light off and we'll check it out again.
I went ahead and taped the panels together with some clear packing tape and it looks pretty fricking sweet
so I ordered a bunch of orange LEDs, I think a hundred LEDs, and those should get here in the next couple days.
While waiting for the LEDs, I'm gonna figure out how to mount them and make some finger mounts so I can hold the spell out in front of me like a huge nerd.
I love corn dogs for two reasons.
For one, because they're delicious and two, because the box they come in has got relatively large cardboard.
This is my idea for holding onto the spell.
It's just five finger holes like a bowling ball kind of, except it doesn't rip your fingers off when you throw it.
And the cardboard is just a cheap test for, you know, you're not using your expensive materials when you're trying to test the fit.
I'm not really sure where I'm gonna get the acrylic, though because I did pretty much use all of it for the discs.
Um, I might have to get creative. Hmmm...
This is Pleasure-Bot 4000 and contrary to the name it brings me literally nothing but pain.
The LEDs are here
These LEDs are ridiculously small. They sell smaller ones, but I basically don't buy anything smaller than this size
which is 0805 because they're impossible to handle if you drop it on the floor basically blends in with dust.
The decision I made early on to keep the disc stacked against each other kind of changed
I actually intended on putting some space between them
and that means I don't have to use the surface mount LEDs and that was sort of like
stuck in my head for some reason. I've made some spacers that hold the whole assembly together.
You can see this is the finger mount plate and the space between the disks
and the space is large enough that it allows me to use these RGB strips that I've been testing with.
I'm going to scrap the orange LEDs even though I kind of put a lot of time and effort and like 15 bucks into it.
So yeah, I feel kind of silly.
I tend to give myself artificial deadlines and this time it's me telling Cameraman John that the Doctor Strange spell prop is done.
I tend to work faster than my head than I do in real life
so I didn't film a lot of what I'd done and what I've done is wrapped the RGB LEDs around, use clear packing tape to hold everything together, and put some wires on it.
The flickering is controlled by an Arduino Uno. The driving is done by six transistors.
Color is selected by grounding the red channel for all the LEDs and then putting the green channel through
a 330 ohm resistor to lower the brightness to get orange instead of yellow.
The blue channel isn't used at all since - I can plug it in you'll see sort of a purple now
It's not super dynamic, but it works.
In the spirit of crappy science everything is taped down. The Arduino is taped down. The batteries taped down. The wires are taped down.
Basically what I'm trying to say I didn't want to spend the time to like make a whole circuit board. I'm lazy
I'm lazy. I'm just lazy.
I call this experiment a success. However, there are a lot of things I think could be done a lot better.
One of them being how everything is held together and how the LEDs are mounted because currently they don't like to stay on the edge of the acrylic.
Now the brightness too, is something I wish could be a little bit better.
I don't think the depth of the cut or the width of the cut has anything to do with the brightness of the design.
It all has to do with the surface finish and the laser doesn't necessarily leave that like nice matte finish that allows the light to escape.
It kind of polishes, so some like way of sand blasting or something other than the laser, like a mill that leaves a much rougher surface finish for these features
to make them brighter and kind of more glowy looking because right now they kind of just look like really thin pencil lines.
Now, it's time to give away some free stuff. This time it's Doctor Strange themed coasters.
We've got this one and this one and we also have the eye of Amagato.
Whatever the time one is. These are freshly cut off the laser, designed by Cameraman John himself and to win
Be a subscriber and leave a comment, and the winners I'll pick randomly next video
Which should be around next week, and it will be awesome. Here's a preview, I think, or maybe not.
Bye!