When making your Halloween costume involves solder and wires, you know it’s serious.
This year we wanted to do Tron, and we wanted to do it right! Luckily we found an amazing group, UD Replicas, that makes motorcycle outfits that are actual screen-accurate replicas of various costumes. So, these outfits were not cheap: full leather with padding and certified for safety on a motorcycle. They looked amazing, had fantastic detail with reflective strips and everything…. but: they didn’t light up!
You can’t have a Tron outfit that doesn’t light up!
So it was time to sit down and do some serious work. I bought the electroluminescent wire, and battery pack / AC converters from AdaFruit (a fantastic online electronic hobby materials shop if you’re not familiar), got out the black tape and soldering kit, and set to work.
In order to have piping for the “disc” on the back of the jacket, on the front of the jacket, and up and down both the arms and the legs, we ended up needing a total of 5 battery packs stowed all over our bodies to keep the whole thing running.
It took a lot of work but was totally worth it in the end. If you’re interested in making a really big impression with a light-up costume, I highly recommend sitting down and putting in the work for something like this.
