Halloween Costume: The Finale

Halloween has come and past, and I managed to wear the costume a couple times (and also slept in it, but that's a separate matter). I also managed to get the sonic screwdriver working, after I figured out that I couldn't actually make the sound thing work (it turns out that capacitors don't work as I'd thought), and I also couldn't use AAA batteries, so I had to make use of some smaller batteries I had in a flashlight. But it worked! I used a cigar tube for the main body, glued on a washer on top, a quartz crystal on top of that, and put a blue high-powered LED inside, with a push switch on the bottom. I also put on some paint black strips of balsa wood to break up the silver tube, and give it a little grip.

This is the whole get up:

And this is the embarrassing video I promised:

Halloween Costume: The beginning

Halloween is just around the corner, and I've been looking forward to putting together a costume for a little while now. I actually had to make myself hold off on working on it until October. So for this Halloween, I decided to be the Doctor. From Doctor Who. It's a British sci-fi show, look, it's not important. So come October, I started hitting up thrift stores for a trench coat and a suit, and also got a pair of converse knock-offs, which make up most of the costume. The final item is a sonic screwdriver, which, for my purposes, is a cylindrical object that lights up and makes a ululating sound when it's switched on.

So I bought some LEDs, capacitors, a buzzer and a breadboard, and started to put it together based on a rough idea of how it should work. It turns out that the ululating buzzer is going to take some more work, but I was able to get the LEDs working. Which is actually not very impressive, but hey, it's a start.