Arc Reactor

It is not a secret that I am a huge Iron Man fan. 

I fulfilled myself a dream building my own Arc Reactor!

 


At the beginning I designed all the parts in Adobe Illustrator. I cut them out of 2mm thick acrylic with the help of a lasercutter. I am currently giving away the plans in exchange for donations for my website! I am also giving away a complete set of the lasercut parts in exchange
If you're looking for a demonstration video scroll down to the bottom of the page!

These are the basic components. I etched a dot matrix onto some parts in order to disperse the led light better. Most background lights have these dots on them. Add some nice paint:

Clip together two of the outer rings with the spacers seen above in the left top corner:

Starts looking a bit more like an Arc Reactor from Iron Man, doesn't it? 
Now I added the background plates for the reactor's coils.

 The Arc Reactor's core consits of three rings and the silver mesh:

 With the help of some paint and aluminum a fourth ring is held right above the core.

 Here you can see the Arc Reactor's inner parts fully assembled:

The next step was winding the coils! The wire I used for this task is coated 0,8 mm thick copper wire.

Additionally I added a layer of paper for better reflection of the blue Leds. There are 10 coils on the Arc Reactor. 5 have blue Leds beneath them. I inserted them through a little slot from bottom into the acrylic and then wound the wire around it.

All Leds need some resistors! I allways wired up two leds in parallel and added the right resistor. For finishing the baseplate watch the video below. 5 Leds go into the ring and 3 Leds go into the baseplate's spaces. Wire everything up, glue it together and your homemade Iron Man Arc Reactor is ready for the next costume party! 

 

courtesy:
http://www.doityourselfgadgets.com