Tron Bag V.2.0

If you haven’t seen the new Tron: Legacy yet (in 3D, at
least twice, well over $100 in tickets…they got me…), than you really may not have the required
pre-reqs to enjoy this little DIY Tron bag as much as the next guy.
But hey, check it out anyway! Here’s a shot of my kiddo sporting
the thayng. The bag is a really cool STM ipad messenger
bag I picked up off of amazon that was retrofitted with some EL
wire from cool
neon. I totally one-offed the idea from one of my new
favorite sites and blog ladyada.net on her totally awesome Tron bag
tutorial
(yes, said totally twice, doh! three times in one
sentance). If you’re looking to do something like this, I suggest you
read her very informative tutorial on EL
wire as well. Between Adafruit Industries
(her money making venture I assume) and sparkfun, I’ve spent at
least $200 bucks on crazy electronics projects over the past few
weeks! Though I’d say her Tron bag is much more fitting to the
movie as it’s black, I like the smaller form factor of the one I
threw together! The bag also uses the ‘sound’ driver from cool neon
so it will actually beat to the music! Yes, it’s bad a. I’ll post a
vid when I get a chance to shoot one. Shot of the bag in the
daytime (which I actually think looks pretty cool with the design
lines): Few more shots glowing:
So here’s a few tips I learned along the way
along with some screenshots to help: – Tape everything down but
don’t use the blue painting tape that I did (it was annoying). -
Don’t let it fool, you this project requires mad sewing (just don’t
let your strait dude friends find out). – STM bags are really,
really well made. I mean really. I literally was using pliers to
sew through the material. Kudos to those cats. – Buy the 4 way
splitter from cool neon (or whoever) for the driver. I had to
retrofit one together (see pics below) and it was a pain. – Buy the
driver end and wire end of the connectors they sell on cool neon.
It would have made the soldering a ton easier. – When they say
‘don’t bend the wire more then you could around a pencil’ they mean
it. I have to play ‘jiggle the old toilet handle’ every once in a
while to a section to work properly after over bending. – Order the
length you think you’ll need then add a foot or so. I ordered 30ft
of the stuff and the color was different at shorter lengths, pretty
crazy! – Have fun! I totally dug doing the project and thanks a ton
to ladyada for the fine tutorial! Jimmy-rigged 4way splitter for my EL wires
Shot of the tapings. How I hated the
tapings… In progress shot Functionality shot of the bag. No loss in
bag functionality at all!

About these ads

10 Jan This entry was published on January 10, 2011 at 4:34 pm. It’s filed under EL Wire, Electronics, ipad, Messenger Bags, Projects, Tron and tagged bag, cool bag, DIY, hacks, messenger bag, mods, Tron, Tron bag, Tronification. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.