The Outcast’s Rest is an enchanted locker created by benevolent spirits to entomb the foul Putreghast. For ages, the locker stood silent, but as time marched on… something changed. The locker now calls out to you when you are near, the entity within begging for release. The voices claim that it is John Callaghan, American tourist that is trapped within… however can you be sure?
The project itself is centered around the ornate decor and the voice lines, it is all made possible with the Adafruit Sound FX board and a PIR sensor that triggers the board to play sounds.
“On the night of Samhain ages ago, a violent presence from the blackness overtook a young boy named Tiredain. His mind was wrung into a manifestation of darkness and his body was repeatedly crushed and remade into the very visage of unnatural evil. His odor was of the days of plague carts and his voice was of crackling embers under a screen of wet phlegm. This was the Putrighast. It was sealed away in an adorned box by an unknown enchanter. The Putrighast still calls out to this day to be released.”
The video will feature a montage of the construction of the box as a mystical object through many close up dutch angle shots of the details. During the montage, the above narration would be given. It will then cut to a wide angle shot of the box and people walking in front of it, the box will speak as people pass by, expect it won’t sound like some monster, it will just be a normal dude politely asking people to let him out because “they got the wrong guy”.
Idea 1: God from Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a soldered stained glass mural, with glowing components and sound bites from the movie that are motion activated.
Idea 2: Lunisolar Calendar in the form of planetary models. Three led orbs will travel in their relative positions from each other to represent the time of year.
Idea 3: Similar to the second idea, except instead of orbs, it will be shadows across a projected sun to keep track of the time of year on a lunisolar calendar.
Khonshu is the traveling moon god of the night sky. He is heavily featured in the Marvel IP Moon Knight where he bestows upon his servants powers to carry out his justice and vengeance. This was done as part of a group costume with Vani and Heba. Vani is the Moon Knight who dons the ceremonial armor of Khonshu and is the default agent of vengeance, Heba is Mrs. Knight, her own interpretation of the split ego of the Moon Knight.
At the inception of the idea I was extremely excited, I felt that I had most of what I needed to make it. On top of that, the character design of Khonshu includes a lot of flowing cloth which I have always been a big fan of. Wearing the costume was honestly quite cozy. My Judo pants and Karate gi were very spacious and comfortable to wear, the large sheet I draped over myself was also quite comforting. The two components that I didn’t quite enjoy wearing were the balaclava and the plague doctor’s mask. I couldn’t see ANYTHING out of that mask.
One thing in particular that I learned to do for this project was rudimentary styling for large fabrics. The way I styled it wasn’t quite sophisticated or complex. I was inspired by the look of Biblical shepherds in iconography, the way the cloth sits on the figures are interestingly graceful and mysterious. If I were to do the project again, I would spend even more time styling the large fabric, perhaps combining different pieces and textures to create an even more interesting look. I would also begin crafting and compiling materials even sooner, perhaps in August or September. There were some really cool high visibility bird skull masks on Etsy that would’ve been much more accurate, but unfortunately they take up to 5 weeks to ship so it was not feasible. I would also like to add lustrous aluminum and brass elements to further bring forth the more ethereal visage of Khonshu.
I have decided to do a group costume with Heba and Vani. My costume will be of Khonshu from Marvel’s Egyptian mythology inspired series called “Moon Knight”.
The costume has many parts. The main parts are the mask and the staff.
The staff will be the primary LED component. Rather than having the staff just glow at all times, I want it to glow as the staff makes contact with the ground. This will be achieved by a photocell and vibration switch housed at the bottom of the staff (having two components for redundancy). The photocell detects light and the vibration switch detects vibrations, I will program the circuit to turn on the LEDs in the staff’s tip when the photocell detects a dramatic decrease in light and/or when the vibration switch detects a vibration of sufficient magnitude.
The mask is a plague doctor mask that I purchased on Amazon. I will place joint compound on to make it more boney so that it fits the look of Khonshu. It will not have any LED elements.
For the rest of the body, I will be draping it with large pieces of white cloth over my old and oversized karate uniform. This past weekend I went to FabScrap with Heba and Vani so I was able to purchase a lot of fabric.
While these other planning steps are complete, I do need some help with designing the circuit!
If this seems like too much in terms of scope, I have a back-up plan of keeping the staff and changing the overall costume into Gandalf/Saruman the White.
It was hard to hone in on the things I wanted to do for the costumes, but there were a couple that I was able to pin down.
The King of Ooo from Adventure Time
He’s a bit of a scammer.Shimmering LED crown with beige and brown T-shirt and pants. The key part will be the LED scepter with a smiley face.
Mask of Life from Bionicle
Led on the underside edge of the mask to make a spooky glow.
Khonshu
LED staff components as well as LED necklace. Surprisingly I already have most of the stuff for this costume. I plan to use my old over-sized karate outfit for the core garments. I plan to use large curtains to create the large draping fabric. I already have a staff at home, I just need to put on a crescent LED attachment. All I really need to make from scratch is the glowing necklace. The biggest issue I foresee is the large bird-skull that makes up Khonshu’s head, I plan to purchase and modify a plague doctor’s mask.
Mishmish the Magic Duck is a plush night light of a round little duckling with warm lustrous cheeks. Mishmish’s appearance is based on a childhood stuffed duck toy that brought a lot of comfort in the first few weeks I slept alone (around 4 years of age). I made Mishmish with this experience in mind. I wanted Mishmish to help kids in the developmental phase of initial self-soothing, where they have to sleep without their parents through the entire night. It is a very big change and the presence of comfort and warmth in the form of a stuffed toy can really help with their adjustment.
I tried to make Mishmish as soft and as friendly as possible, therefore I went with using felt for its body, beak, and feet. I used fabric marker for the eyes and added leather components for the rear pockets. 2 yellow LEDs are placed in the cheeks, they were soldered into a parallel circuit and connected to a 5V battery pack.
This project was honestly quite a bit of fun! I got to try out a lot of stuff that I’ve never done before. While I’ve soldered and sewn in the past, they weren’t for projects of this nature at all! I’ve done a lot of circuitboard soldering and leather sewing so they were somewhat adjacent to the skills required for this project. As a result, I wanted to play it a bit safe and so I scoped accordingly. Truth be told I was actually impressed with how I scoped and budgeted my working hours. I was left with a good stretch of time for problem solving anything that wasn’t quite working.
If I had more time to work on my project I would definitely redo the leather components with better material and more care. I was quite careless with how I made these leather parts because I saw them as tertiary, however I think if Mishmish gets some really nice leather doodads, it would give off even more of a warm and homey feeling.
A sketch of Mishmish along with its circuit diagram.
Lantern fish with corresponding circuit. God from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, to fill the room with the Holy Spirit for those who may fear to tread in the dark.Childhood duckling toy with glowing eyes.
For my plush night light, I really honed into the idea of remaking a duck toy I had when I was very young. It was my most memorable and earliest stuffed animal so I think it would be really neat if I could make it with some added bells and whistles.
For the body and head of the duck, I have decided to order some yellow wool felt fabric (1.4mm thick), it will arrive shorty on Thursday night/Friday Morning. As for some of the other elements on the body, I have decided to use leather. The leather I ordered has already arrived and I have been playing around with it for a little bit.
Cutting the “P” button in the leatherLeather component experiments with stitch holes punched with chisel and mallet.
The target user is a child aged 5-8 who may have become a lot more autonomous and independent in many tasks and activities but they still may require some help to encourage them to not be afraid of the dark. This particular night light is meant to be placed in a child’s first bedroom. In other words this night light I meant to assist children who are essentially sleeping without their parents for the first time. The shape is curved and bulbous while the color is warm and welcoming, offering a benevolent glow as if it is a mystical little sidekick in a wholesome animated movie.
The piece of electronic equipment I drew for my teardown was a modem. Initially I had chosen the mouse, however it was taken by another during the Yankee Swap. I also had some interest in other items such as the cameras, however I didn’t have the heart to take it from others who seemed very enthused about it. Therefore, while picking my replacement I stuck with the still-available pieces of equipment laid about on the table. At the instructor’s suggestion, I picked the modem because it was insisted that the modem was simple. I would say that “simple” is a serious understatement.
Going into the project, I really had no idea what the interior of a modem looked like. I had pictured a pretty complex machine so I expected to use a bit of finesse and elbow grease to take the whole thing apart. As I soon discovered, it really wasn’t the case. After unwinding all the screws I was able to see, the exterior shell came apart extremely easily. The shell came in two halves, encasing a circuit board in the middle. I looked around for more components to rip out but there were none. I stood by the workbench with a screwdriver in my hand and an empty expression on my face, I was not sure what to do. The entire process took around five minutes, required only a screwdriver, and produced a grand total of eight components (four screws, one switch, two halves of a shell, and a single circuit board). It is difficult to determine what the screws are made out of, but they are likely to be stainless steel or some aluminum alloy. The material of the enclosure was also very difficult to determine. Lengthy visual comparisons narrowed it down to likely common plastics of this application such as Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) and Polycarbonate (PC) or a blend of PC+ABS. The enclosure was probably injection molded rather than thermoformed. The circuit board itself is most likely fashioned from silicon with conductive copper alloy elements buried within it.
Figure 1. Disassembled components laid outFigure 2. The circuit board.
After the initial teardown and cursory analysis of the materials of each large component, I decided to continue to get very granular in analyzing the circuit board and its smaller components. In total I counted approximately 281 individual items on the circuitboard. It was virtually impossible for me to identify any of the extremely small components like the transistors, therefore I chose to focus on the bigger components.
For me, most immediately noticeable thing about the circuit board was all the text. It offered a lot of clues as to what each component actually was and their origins. The machine itself was a Courier External 56k* V.92 Global Dial-Up Business Modem from USRobitics with the year 2006 stamped on the circuit board. Many of its major chips seemed to have come from all over the world. Prominently featured in this circuit board is chips from the Japanese company NEC, as well as ISSI, Innovasic, the Taiwanese company MXIC, also Texas Instruments. The entire circuit board itself was assembled in China.
x1 MXIC MX29F800CTTI-70G IC NOR Flash Memory IC 8MB This component is a memory unit of the NOR Flash architecture. I am not really able to parse through all the technical jargon, but in essence this chip has a memory function in the circuit board. https://octopart.com/datasheet/mx29f800ctti-70g-macronix-11917995
x2 Texas Instruments SN75188 Quadruple Line Driver x1 Texas Instruments SN75189A Quadruple Line Driver x1 Texas Instruments D172B1PJ92 Quad Flat Package As for the rest of these components, I am unable to even begin to really understand what they are used for, nevertheless I have included some data sheets I found on them. https://www.ti.com/product/SN75188 https://www.ti.com/product/SN75189A
Interestingly enough, I couldn’t find any information on any of the NEC components.
Part Three
One unexpected development or take away I had from this teardown was my new fascination for cooling and temperature management in household electronics. I spent a long while looking at the vents in the enclosure and wondered why it was the way it was. The bottom surface had no vents, whereas the sides, and the top featured vents very prominently. Having large vents on the top side makes a lot of sense. Since heat rises, the top vent provides the heated air with an upward pathway to escape, thereby passively drawing cooler surrounding air into the enclosure from the side vents, effectively creating a very slow air flow. I reckon that it’s enough of an air flow for the temperature to be more or less controlled within the operational range. Beyond having utility, the vents are also very visually dominating. These grates in particular create an interesting cage-like form. It has made me ponder about how different electronics handle the visual presentation of exterior necessities such as vents on enclosures.
Figure 4. The bottom shell, showing the side vents. Figure 5. The top shell, showing the large grated vents.
Another thing about this modem that really stuck out to me was the international workmanship of the device. It really demonstrates the international collaboration when it comes to more (at the time) sophisticated technologies. For me, I hear about the globalized supply chain all the time, however it was very interesting for me to see it presented in such a way directly from a teardown. The engineers most likely had no choice but to source internationally due to constraints with time, cost, and etc.
