Is it a whip? Is it a wreath? Who knows!
About My Project
I have always liked the idea of making my own cosplay, since I get to not only feel pride in making fun costumes, but I also get to make epic weaponry. So for our third Hackathon of the semester, I decided to make a divine willow vine whip from a Chinese novel about martial arts and spiritual cultivation. Its base is a clear tubing with fake willow vines wrapped around it. The handle is made of braided leather straps. I wanted to make it glow, so I used an Arduino Nano and NeoPixels to produce a pulsing light effect.
Process
I first had to spray paint the willow vines gold, and the I had to figure out how to attach the vines to the tubing. I first tried hot gluing each vine to the tube, but that took too long and the glue wasn't holding properly. I decided to wrap zip ties around everything to get them to stay.
After cutting off the excess plastic from the zip ties, I braided the leather straps together and glued them around one end of the whip.
Though I didn't have enough time to wire and solder all of the NeoPixels, I was able to get my code to work. I coded a bouncing brightness function where it looked like the light represented a beating heart, which would have the made the whip look more like the holy weapon I had in mind.
https://github.com/jtan2689/Whip-Wreath-Glowing-Code
Reflection
This project was definitely one of the most stressful projects I have ever undertaken. Like I stated before, it was supposed to be a golden willow vine whip that glowed with NeoPixels. However, the gold spray paint peeled off, it looked more like a wreath than a whip, and I couldn't add the NeoPixels as the wiring kept messing up. Though I am glad that I was able to at least have something that looked decent enough to present. Plus, I would have been able to put together all of the components if I had more time, so this wasn't a total fail!
