Making my own toys

During Anime Expo 2017, I was wandering through the exhibition hall when I came across the Cerevo booth. For the uninitiated, Cerevo is the company responsible for bringing us the dominator gun replica from the show “Psycho Pass”

The replica gun features all the gimmicks that the show gun has (minus the lethal part - it is a toy, after all). This includes lights, a transformation animation consisting of several moving parts, as well as Bluetooth control and a camera that streams video directly to your connected smartphone. In short, it is the must-have toy for hardcore fans.

At the Cerevo booth, I had the pleasure of speaking with CEO Takuma ‘TK’ Iwasa, who, coincidentally, already knew about my Gray Fox helmet.

This meeting inspired me to begin development of my own “must-have” toy of my own. And so I began work on the design of the Graviton Lance.

I packed as much technology as I knew how to into this project, while maintaining the original concept intact. That meant no moving parts and no Bluetooth connectivity were necessary.

Having no experience in board design, I designed around two prototyping boards from Adafruit - one to handle the light animations and one to handle the sound effects and amplification.

Adafruit Pro Trinket - 5V 16MHz

Adafruit Audio FX Sound Board + 2x2W Amp

I wired the inputs from the sound board to an output from the main lights board so that I could digitally control the sound board.

The completed prop can be seen here.