I’ve recently returned from the Star Trek 50 year mission celebration in Chicago. It was an incredible experience. I can’t wait to go to another Trek convention. We’re considering going to the Las Vegas 30 year TNG anniversary next year. The convention had so many great costumes, I’ve decided to give it a go and make one of my own.
I want my costume to stand out. I was thinking I could combine the things I enjoy with 3D printing, costume making, and electronics to make a really great Andorian Borg set. Some of the parts are straight forward – plenty of tubing, some basic LEDs, etc. I’ve got a few ideas.
Working antennae – using the concepts from the inMoov robot project, I can create an articulated antenna pair. For the base part, I would want it to rotate just forward and back. However as we move closer to the end of the antenna, I need it to rotate inward a little. Here is my prototype mechanism.
I figure I can drive these with some simple microservos from Adafruit. I’ll run one servo for each so I can control them independently. I’ll need three additional standard servos to run a couple greeblies on the end of my enclosed borg arm and assimilation tubes on the other arm.
To make the eye piece for the borg headset I thought it would be great to have a TFT display embedded within the headpiece displaying a cool visual. This will require going over to a raspberry pi to run the electronics. Arduino just can’t hack the video requirements. I’m going to run it on an original Pi and buy the new Pi3 to replace my home tv display. It looks like I’ll need a shield to run the PWM outputs for the servos.
Some other odds and ends for the borg parts will be some LEDs, switches hidden inside the left arm unit and the palm of the right hand, and a master power switch so I can turn it off during convention sessions (save power and not disturb other people).
Those are my initial thoughts. I’m sure it’ll change as the project progresses. I think I’m going to work on the electrical and mechanical parts, then the clothing pieces, followed by the facial prosthetic and makeup.
Tim Saucer 