Alphonse Elric of Fullmetal Alchemist may be only a soul bound to steel armor, but you don’t have to go quite as far as he did to make a replica of his suit. Instructables user Tomcat94 spent four months piecing together his Alphonse costume from craft foam. It all started with sketches and cutting out all the pieces – that part alone took three months. He added LEDs to make the eyes in the helmet light up, and he simply used Velcro to attach them.
Here’s how he painted the craft foam to get a nice silver shine:
I tested the spraypaint with uncoated craft foam, but soon realized that it wouldn’t put off the same sort of shine as I expected. I looked up some tutorials, and saw someone mention using watered-down tacky glue to seal the craft foam first, so I decided to give it a go. I filled a small container with tacky glue and then added water until it was about the consistency of acrylic paint. I used this to seal the pieces before spraypainting them, which gave the suit an excellent shine.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.