8/10/2018

I bought my first 3D printer for Christmas 2017. I had some fun downloading and printing pre-made things, sometimes making small changes to them. But i had not yet designed and printed something fully on my own yet.

I was thinking of cool, wild things to print when all the sudden i had a huge rush of nostalgia and remembered this arcade game i used to play at Chuck E Chesse when i was a little kid. The game is called Tower Of Power. I remember Frankie and I got so good at this game.

Tower Of Power

The arcade machine gives off total mad scientist vibes which I was just so inspired by. I wanted to create something I could put on my desk at work, and the main features I wanted to incorporate were,

  • The glowing orbs
  • The accordion like ribbed structure
  • The “fluid/bubbles” flowing up the tube
  • The flashing lightning bolt

The final design is made of a cylindrical tower with a lightning bolt embossed on the front. There is a color changing, ribbed stack on each side with a pipe that connects to the top. The tower is capped with a spherical dome that has 3 glowing orb tipped horns.

I found a piece of wood that perfectly fit inside with a piece of color changing LED tape on each side and the front. On the back of the wood i put a circuit board that is used to change the color of the lights with a remote. For the top blue orbs, I used a 3 single blue LEDs in series for each orb. I had to add a resistor to the group in order to use the same 12 Volts DC I was using to power the controller and color changing tape.

Since the 3 Color changing tapes all changed color together, I decided I wanted the front lightning bolt to stay yellow at all times. What I had to do was re-wire the front tape so that instead of being connected to the controller, it was connected to directly to the power. I then had to be clever about how I added resistors so that the color was always yellow VS some other color.