Iron Man With CPX

Howdy folks! In this instructable I will be talking through how to make a light up "arc reactor" from Iron Man, and make a super quick and easy costume to go with it!

For this project, you will need:

- Scissors

- A Circuit Playground Express (CPX) board

- Cable and battery pack for the CPX

- Laptop for coding

- Iron Man costume OR Red shirt with yellow-painted cardboard

- Tape or sewing equipment

- Excitement and enthusiasm!

For this Step, you will grab the CPX and it's cable as well as your laptop. You will then plug it all in and go to the website makecode.adafruit.com

When here, you will start the code that is in the picture for this step. The codes are related to the two different buttons on the CPX. When you press button "A", the CPX will make a "power up" noise and create blue lights, similar to Iron Man's arc reactor. Then, to power the device down you will press button "B" which will make a "power down" noise and create red lights before shutting off.

The coding for "A" is pretty straightforward, where you are saying that when the button is pressed the bliue lights will turn on one by one from the first LED in the sequence to the last. For "B" there is one extra step of coding needed, which is changing the direction and starting position of the lights color. With the extra step in the "B" code, the LED's now begin to change color from the last LED to the first in the sequence, and at the end they all shut off.

After the code is created, you will download it onto your CPX and test it out. After you have confirmed that it works, you will unplug it from your laptop and attach it to the battery pack you have with you.

After creating the code for the CPX, you have a few different options for how to create your Iron Man suit, such as buying a costume for Iron Man or making a suit yourself. I chose to create a very simple suit for this project, and I made yellow cardboard with yellow paint to affix to a red shirt.

For this step, you can look at the Iron Man suit and see where all of the different colors are. After this, you can cut out the shapes that you want to add or even create your own suit with whatever shapes or colors that you want!

When you have your shapes and know where you would like them to go on your "suit", you can affix them using either sewing material (such as needles and thread) or tape!

Now that you have all your pieces and have begun to attach them to your work, you can begin to add any final touches that you would like to. After this, you can either cut a hole in the shirt to place the CPX, sew it into the middle of the shirt, or tape it down to the middle. All of these options work, as long as you can attach the power source somewhere (because we aren't Iron Man sadly).

Make sure that everything is securely attached and won't fly off mid flight!

You've created your Iron Man arc reactor and suit! Now it's time to put it on and go save the world!!