Hot Wire Cutter PWM Circuit Board

A circuit board for my hot wire cutter to provide a pulsing function, so that different lengths and thicknesses of nichrome wire can be used.

The circuit allows me to control the power supply, constantly turning it off and on varying the current, depending on the type of wire used, as not to melt it.

This is a prototype board to test whether the function will work in conjunction with providing the cutting wire ample heat.

It uses a mosfet with  4.5v gate drive eliminating the need to power the arduino chip separately.

For the final circuit board, I will implement a standalone arduino chip and a potentiometer to control the pulsing function.

Laying Up

Laying up the mould, first with a gelcoat layer, then fibreglass.

Making the Fibreglass Mould

Mask Lights: PCB Design

Design to be printed onto a circuit board. This will let me implement the lights neatly without all the loose wires as seen in the last post.

Mask: Eye Light Circuit Prototype

The lights for the masks eyes are made up of 48 LEDs (16x3), and makes use of 6 x 74hc595 shift registers, along with an Arduino Uno.

Due to the amount of LEDs and their arrangement, I decided to use cardboard instead of a breadboard. The video only shows the bottom two sets of 8 working, but this was due to the wires on the back (see below) crossing.

Managed to get 4 sets of 8 LEDs working with the code, so going to get a circuit board printed, as the same principle applies to the next two sets of 8 LEDs. Also fiddling between the wires and maintaining it when pins come loose took a while, so made sense to go straight to the circuit board.

Mask Casting

After takingbhe master out I putnon some mold release spray, then cast the mask and a gun mold I made out of some excess silicone.

Mask Mold: silicone