This month I'm adding a new segment to the summary section. I have created this image to visually show how much of the suit I have made and at what stage each part is at. Each stage is colour-coded and white parts are unstarted as of yet. I'll leave this image on the left side of the summary each month so you can easily keep track of how far each month has got me. So this month I have completed the arm's design fully and the helmet has progressed by being almost half 3D printed. All I hope for next month is to have as many parts 3D printed as possible. Until I know what size the helmet, arms and hands are, I can't start working on the chest/back of the suit, which I hear a lot of people just want to see (I really want to make it too!!). Once the sizing of each of those parts are done, I can pick between designing the chest/back and designing the mechanisms of the other current pieces. I hope to be working on the chest/back by December so my goal for next month simply is to get as many parts 3D printed as possible!

So last week I finished off the palm section with me only 3D printed the upper palm in the new smaller size. This month I completed 3D printing the whole palm and it fits like a glove. The one issue I got on the upper palm was the curled up bottom parts where the 3D print started on the bed. This is due to the ABS shrinking as it cools and that those parts of the base of the print were really thin. On the other hand, the lower palm came out without any curled parts because it has a much wider base. The problem with the upper palm having a curled base meant I'd have to sand it down until it was level with the top of the lower palm but then the design wouldn't match up.

At this point I realised how important it is to take the shrinking of the abs into account when designing my parts. I have come to a decision that all mechanisms will be metallic parts embedded into the suit. For example, the elbow joints on the arms were the first thing I thought of and headed on over to ebay to see what I could find. I ended up buying 4 cupboard hinges; More on this later. First off before I bought those hinges or even started to replacement metallic parts for the mechanisms I had already designed, I had to really look into how I was going around and designing this suit.

My new idea is now to actually have the arms being completely separate from the main suit, even in the suitcase form. Now, the plan is that the lower arm will just stay as it always will be, no opening parts, no wrist joints, just the elbow joint using the metal hinges I got to connect to the upper arm. The upper arm is where things are happening now. I have broken it into three pieces now, two that hinge off the other. The main piece will be the back piece which connects to the elbow joint by two parts going up at the bottom of the upper arm. These parts will need to be slim as the pieces that oped up at the top need to go around the armour blocking it on the lower arm. This may cause me to cut down the metallic hinges I bought but I'll base how much I cut after I have figured out how much I can embed in the design. The top two pieces will split apart in the middle and hinge on metallic hinges embedded inside the sides of the lower piece. The reason for all this is basically I'm using the pre-existing  elbow joint to half the size of the arms. What is happening is the upper arm will open up, fold in and onto the lower arm and... well... eat it.

Now that I know I need more room for my hand bend upwards I have made a new cutout on the top, where my wrist cover joint was. This meant I could no longer have the wrist joint. I then thickened the repulsor see-through piece so you could no longer see the circuit board when the lights are off. After printing this and testing it I think that the new thickness just kills the look. I'm thinking of adding a see-through curved plastic cutout and adding some other decorations, maybe a ring to fuse the outer lights, or generally something that looks cool.

One thing I will have to change after this redesign is the base point when 3D printing. I want to change this to the top of the palm cover plate as the original palm cover piece printed quite well that way up. Also, seeing the front of the palm is going to be seen the most, I want its quality to be the best. That means I need to have it on top, not the bottom. The benefit of doing this is that even if the cover plate is bad quality, I can easily smooth it by sanding down on its smooth curve. Here's a picture of my latest lower palm part that shows how bad the front of the palm looks when it is at the bottom of the print and the lowered areas look with the support material:

After spending those 2 days learning all that I set out to write my own code and I actually got it to all work on my second try! The gif on the left shows the jewel when I used a sample test script just to show you what it looks like before it goes inside the repulsor. I have programmed it so the outer 6 Neopixels will always dimly glow but between two angles (measured by the potentiometers) the outer 6 Neopixels will brighten up and the inner Neopixel will turn on, brighten and have a slight blue tinge. The angles where the lights are affected are between my hand being straight and when fully tilted up, in firing position. I will also play a sound effect when the repulsors are fully activated if I can integrate a soundboard/speaker setup into the suit.

When I started designing my suit I decided to start with the palms. Funny thing is, I thought that the palms would take the longest to design and the rest would be easy. Turns out they have been the second quickest to designed yet (just following the fingers). I started the suit by designing a simple chest piece. I did this by creating a box and then trying to change the corner positions. I had some issues of how the three axis's positioned themselves so I then changed to trying to subtract boxes off of the main box.

The first suit piece I learned to properly use most of these tools in was my palm. I spent 4 days straight making the basic palms and a lot had to be taken into consideration while designing them. For designing the arms and legs I have decided to always design the right variant and to then mirror it for the left so that is why you'll always see designs for the right arm/leg. While modeling the palm I had a mesh model I was able to export from a pepakura palm design to follow. After creating the basic cube I started to cut the shape then work on the angles, I then worked on the centre repulsor circle and worked outwards from there, lifting and deepening faces of the object. Next I started to make out where all the finger holes would be and then I would use the fillet and chamfer tools to start making smooth curved edges all over the suit. Skipping forward many hours I had issues with little indents and curving them and then with keeping some areas flat and some curved correctly. The palm was so complex it really started hurting my brain but in the end I really had fun working out how I was to design the whole thing.

Now this had a lot of design changes while I was figuring out how the transformation mechanism would work and so I will brief run through these idea. So here is the lower arm as it currently is; bulky, I know. I started this off by measuring up my arm with a tape measure and then creating cylinders matching those measurements. After using the loft tool I had a basic skeleton that would wrap around my arm. After adding some cool looking beams that connected the upper and lower bands I made some more cylinders that would form the actual armour. At this time I didn't really think about proportions in terms of to my arm but solely focused on getting it accurate to the movie design so yes it looks great but if I put my arm in it right now it would get two times thicker! I next refined all the detailing and added the different levels of the lower arm, the zig-zag parts in the middle and then worked on the elbow cover. All of this took a long time with drawing the sketches, split the faces, splitting the solids and then using the fillet and chamfer tools to create the shapes I wanted before merging together complete pieces.

So for the transformation mechanism I started off by looking at how the movie worked at that was by having each layer of the lower arm, twist and stack together by sliding along the skeleton rail. This reduced the size of the arm by having it only take up half of the back of the arm, leave the front bear so the front part of the skeleton could slot out/in. his was most definitely not going to be possible unless I really worked hard on the system so I first just thought about having the top half rotate around to the back of the arm so it would half the size of the lower arm but then I would have to offset the arm and have it bulkier on one side compared to the other. This just didn't look good so I finally came to the idea of having the top split in two and then each side would slide outwards before rotating to the back side of the armour. This is the current mechanism although I couldn't get the piece to slide all the way around the back side of the lower but just to slide out to the side so that I could get the front skeleton piece out.

So far this has taken a lot quicker to model as the whole piece is a straight cylinder and I only had to design some funky sketches to cut the solid up into the individual parts for the transformation mechanism. What is going to take quite a while to design is the transformation mechanism. In the film the upper arm basically compresses with the pice splitting into about 6 parts and each slotting inside each other like those little russian dolls. I think this is totally possible and have decided to do this. I haven't completely design the mechanism yet as I need to sort out how the top parts of the upper arm will rotate and fold up corresponding with each piece of the upper arm they are connected to.

So only recently I have decided to create a digital mannequin to help identify problems of the suit before I have even printed the parts, saving filament and cost at the same time. I started off just taking the arm measurements I had already implemented in the arms and turning them into basic cylinders. I then thought I should make the mannequin from the ground up so next I did the feet. A little more detail was added here as I used the loft tool with three sketches to create a smooth model. I continued this fashion with the legs but I think I may have got a bit carried away. After taking the measurements I really strived for a model that looks exactly like my legs. Funny story, I took my measurements using a tape measure you see and with my casual laziness of wearing pyjamas all day I actually ended up pulling down my trousers and holding a tape measure against my legs for quite some time. So there I was standing in my room with my trousers down looking deeply fascinated at my legs. Take it as you will, but in the end the model was really accurate! I carried on this trend when I created the torso. You may think I look slightly fat but from the side my stomach goes in so I ain't! It's just the curves making it look that way! Anyway, I still haven't made the head yet but I plan to do that very soon (right after I slim down the arms because they have more priority). Once I've done that I'll update this mannequin section each month showing all I've designed so far being placed on the body.