Titanfall Data Knife - Advanced Version for Electronics

myminifactory

This is a recreation of the Titanfall Data Knife. It's designed somewhere in between the original knives from Titanfall 1 and Titanfall 2. The final assembled knife can be switched on for a hacking animation with lights and sound. The model was built around several specific parts: a 12BH510-GR battery holder, A23 batteries, an SPPH410100 latching pushbutton switch, a CPE-220 Piezo Buzzer, two 3mm Blue LEDs, an Adafruit Arduino Trinket Microcontroller (5v), and an Adafruit Neopixel Jewel (RGBW - Cool White). I must note that the A23 batteries are not ideal for this project. They can't handle the high current draw of the Neopixel Jewel at its peak, and they're basically just a couple of coin cells in a tube. However, I used them because I had a bunch on hand and they fit in the handle without any issues. The switch is also a bit overkill for this project, but it's a push-button toggle with plenty of travel, so you could do worse. The Adafruit Trinket is a great little board, but it has some limitations. It only has 8kb of programmatic memory, and ~2.5kb of that is taken up by their bootloader. I trimmed the code to get it under the Trinket's default maximum of 5310 bytes, but then I discovered that I could use another Arduino board (like the Uno) to program the trinket and free up extra space. The secret to this is using the "Arduino as ISP" programmer in the Arduino IDE. Once I found out I could do this, I relaxed a bit and added some extra features like the startChime() function below, which produces a nice little start-up noise. If you're desperate to fit this on a stock trinket, you can, but you'll have to comment out some functionality. The code used to run the knife uses Adafruit's NeoPixel library because it's excellent and does what I couldn't do myself. Make sure you install this library if you haven't already.