Iron Man Costume Pieces

As one of MIT's most famous fictional alumni, Tony Stark aka Iron Man has been the subject of many modern engineering students' fascination. As much as I'd love to conjure up futuristic tech at the snap of my fingers, I'll settle for making a costume tribute for now.

I 3D printed the structure of the glowing arc reactor in my shirt and the glove.

The arc reactor pictured above was printed in PLA on the Anet A8 from the below linked files. I assembled the parts by hand and reprinted spare parts as needed. While fragile, when filled with blue fairy lights it was stunning. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2854850

Rounds of prototyping what material the glove armor would be made of. Initially I borrowed my dorm's Cricut cutter and used a pepakura file of the Iron Man Armor to make a model out of cardstock. When this proved to be flimsy, I attempted to use thermoplastic beads for a custom fit. Finally, I resorted to scaling down an existing 3D file for the glove armor and print it in red silk PLA on the Ender 3 printer in my dorm room. Not shown, but the glove is held together on the inside by a strip of elastic glued between the finger pieces and palm.

To finish, I used an Adafruit Circuit Playground board I had laying around to fill the space on the palm where the repulsor lights would be. The board was the perfect size and already had onboard LEDs and an accelerometer/gyrometer, so it was a few simple lines of code to make it so when I raised my hand, the palm LEDs would light up. There was a very long microUSB cable running up my sleeve to connect the board to a portable battery pack.

(fun fact: I had never seen a Marvel movie before the summer between senior year and MIT, in which I binge-watched all 23 movies and cried in the theatre during the Endgame re-release screenings.)