Adam Savage's Guide to Cosplay and Prop Electronics!
the video you're about to watch has been made possible by kiwico which is an awesome company i will tell you about later but for right now let's get into the wiring hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a tool tip hoping to demystify wiring i don't know about you but when i first started making stuff leds were a mystery to me this is an led a light emitting diode it uses quantum mechanics to generate light and they keep us awake all over the world sticking out of our vcrs and our electronics but i found these a mystery you can get them to operate at different brightnesses by adding resistors and i know there's a formula and i know it's just math but i have never learned it and i think i'm pretty common i think i think the way i used to think about electronics was oh it's this big black box and you got to learn how to solder and you got to learn how to do a bunch of math about resistor codes etc and it's sure the answer is yeah being able to wire something up does include all of those things however over the years i have cobbled together my own sort of very simple straightforward work a day approach to wiring things and it works really darn well and i'd like to walk you through it and i'm not going to use any solder in this build i am going to introduce you to my non-soldering techniques that i like um i frequently now don't solder until a build is almost done like i'll work out all the wiring problems using the methods i'm about to use and once i have it all solved then i will make a wiring harness and solder and use heat shrink tubing etc but i don't do that usually until the very end um so let's talk about electronics and wiring function into your costume because that's how that's how i'm framing this uh as my base i'm gonna use a a bill duran foam helmet and we have this blank and i'm going to use this as the blank for my build i'm going to i'm going to put a spinning light on top of it because that makes me smile i am going to put a fan on the side of it because a fan is a really important part of a lot of costumes um i don't know what this fan is doing it's blowing smoke away from you it's unimportant what it's doing what's important is that it's going to come up and then i'm going to put a bunch of these amber leds around here what i want to tell you is yes electronics can potentially include a lot of math but you can also buy a lot of stuff that's all set for the same voltage and only use that voltage for instance leds can now be bought super bright with the resistor already wired in so it has these two leads and all you need to do is hook it up to 12 volts or i think the other kind is 5 volts which is what standard comes out of a usb and this is how i do most of my operations i buy pre-wired leds because it saves me time and energy uh and i don't have to i don't have to think about it um so we have so these leds i'm going to put across the front here and that means i have three different that means i have three different systems uh three different pieces of electrical what do you call it this way i have three different electrical items i want to power uh and i'm gonna use three switches to do that and i thought it would be reasonable to start up front demystifying switches just a little bit because switches are a whole world into and of themselves for instance you have um you have things like push button switches which are also called momentary switches and both of their names describe precisely what's happening a momentary electrical connection it is a push button um there are push button switches that are not momentary they're called latching push button switches and just as this one it stays in when it's connected and it comes out when it's not any switch with a lever like this is often called a toggle switch this switch is called a rocker switch you see their names are all very descriptive but what about the leads coming out of the bottom of these why does this one only have two leads and this one have six why does why does this one have three i'm about to tell you um different switches do different things the simplest switch is called a single pole single throw single throw means it only moves from one position to another and single pole means moving it from one position to another changes only one thing that is these two leads get connected when the switch is down here and they get disconnected when it's up here that's it the three leads on the bottom of this switch make it a single pole sorry a single throw double pole so it still only moves from one position to another but instead of just two leads coming out there's three and that means that i can have one thing on when the switch is like this or i can have a second or different thing on when the switch is like that the way you'd wire this up is that i believe your ground would go to the middle and your two hot leads would go to the outside edge single pole double throw this means it can do two different things and it can't do them simultaneously you can only do one or the other then we end up with oh six leads at the bottom of this uh and the switch has three positions so that is a double throw i think triple pole um basically what this switch is most likely wired to be is that the two leads in the middle are two separate ground leads and it can just like the three positions the three pull switch it can light one thing over here or one thing over here but not both at the same time however because it's got two sets of leads i can run two separate types of power through this i can run five volts through this side and 12 volts through this side holy hell when i discovered this it changed my life i'm using 5 volts and 12 volts repeatedly throughout this video because it's a usb power and 12 volts is standard automotive and those are the two voltages at which they're the most common and widest array of things for you to wire to frequently when you buy a switch like this it comes with a descriptive diagram of a of exactly which leads are latching as you move the switch and again lots of switches are single poles this rocker single pole single throw this one is a single pole single throw except it's got an extra lead to light up the tip i kind of really like that one i bought a whole bunch of them surplus a few years ago and i'm still using them oh one other kind of switch you should know about is this this is called a micro switch it uses this uh long arm to latch your refrigerator uses something like this to stay closed um these are weirdly useful i found these on ebay they're uh they're made on they're made in the great country of china uh which means they're fairly inexpensive what i love about micro switches like this is that i can actually bend this arm so i can make it a door close and i can adjust this arm to fit the space it needs to in order to do the latching that i want it to do micro switches are fantastic for door opening activations um and they make these specifically this is called a microswitch they make them so tiny it would make your head spin i have some really really small ones they tend to be very expensive if you find a bunch in a bin at a garage sale you should just buy them um that is how i began building my collection of micro switches okay that is a little bit of demystification of switches let's talk about wiring up one two three four five six seven eight leds plus a spinny light plus a fan through three different switches it begins with a piece of paper so every wiring job i do begins with a diagram and so should yours a diagram i have basically look i've built my whole life holding complicated arrangements in my head and wiring is the limit of my intellectual ability i have to write it down and i have to keep referring to what i've written down and when i write it down and i have a diagram i'm working on a project right now this is the wiring diagram as i wired in each thing i colored it in red it worked on the first try i couldn't believe it i'm as surprised as you are so let's make a wiring diagram for our fan leds and spinny light um let's see the first thing i always draw is the battery and i label it bat and i give it a positive lead and i give it a negative leap then let's say i do my led lights uh so i'm going to start in pencil because i might make mistakes um so let's do one two three four five six seven eight and we do two leads coming out of each of these these are the leds uh fan plus minus plus is always on the right uh plus it's not always on the right i'm saying for my drawing it's always on the right um so there's the fan there's the leds oh spinning light uh and again i just usually draw versions of what i have and it makes it really easy here's a positive lead and here's a negative lead okay oh right and then there's yeah i just want one switch for each one actually actually no i want yeah i want a master power switch uh okay so switches have a specific uh uh way to draw them and i draw them in my that's a that's a switch i think it's pretty close to how an electrician would draw a switch um so i'm gonna have four switches on this one so i'll draw two three and four uh and i will label these master that's the yeah master power switch uh leds fan spinny light yeah let me uh i can draw this into now uh yep and all right now what do i do now i just start adding wires where i know they go from the battery i know that the power i'm going to be interrupting is the positive lead so i know my battery the first thing it does is it comes over and goes to my master power switch the master power switch then bridges to the leds but it has a secondary connection to the fan and a tertiary collection to the spinning lights so what this means now is i've got a hot lead that comes here and this switch controls that hot lead totally then that hot lead gets fed out of that to the leds but it also gets bridged off to the fan and to the spinny lights okay now with the leds this should be pretty straightforward i move this up i take this lead from the leds when that switch is latched this becomes hot and this comes over to the right side of my first led sorry the left side of my first led let's say that's the positive side um how do i light up all of these well ah i have a choice i can wire them in either what's called parallel or series please also uh refer to other people's videos about uh specific wiring questions you might have i am a dilettante sharing my dilettante's level of knowledge in hopes that the weird way i've figured out how to parse this will help you but don't consider this like any kind of canon advice so you can wire multiple things in what's called series or parallel and those terms are perfectly descriptive in series i'd wire them up like i would wire them up like this uh hot lead goes into the led negative comes out hot comes from that goes there so i'm basically daisy chaining them together with each successive hot lead on the negative lead output of the other the issue with this is i get a voltage drop across all of them so they're all drawing they'll all be a little bit dimmer if i want them all to get the full brightness out of 12 volts i wire all of their leads together and that's called parallel and frankly i can't remember the last time i wired something up in series your christmas lights are wired up in series that's how those little tiny bulbs can take house power and light up um parallel is way more the way i do things around here uh so that's what i'm gonna do with these guys i am going to take the left leads of each one and simply basically this is my way of drawing that they all connect up to the hot leg but where does their negative leg go you know what let me get a blue pen and show you that this is a messy this is a messy wiring diagram i'm sorry that it's messy there are more elegant ways to draw this and i'll tell you the truth um this was the third drawing i made to get this right this was the first one i often my first drawing is just to wrap my head around the problem of illustrating it and then when i want to be really clear about it like i would probably draw my leds in a different way then i make sense of that so uh these negative leads come and they go right to the negative lead of the battery uh when you want to cross in a drawing one wire over another you give it a little half step you give it this little like uh half circle step and uh i'm basically going to do that here i know this is really messy and i recognize that it could be neater but that is not going to be the drawing i do today and yep i drew the wrong wire on that one i i agree i see what i did so then these all chained together just like these did and come out to the negative lead so there's the leds lit that there's two switches that have to be turned on to turn on the leds the master and the led switch okay now we move on to the fan and i think you can see that this is going to be a lot simpler out of the fan lead i come up and over to the hot lead of the fan out of the fan i simply come all the way across to the negative lead same thing with the spinny light i come all the way across and i can connect right there i can connect this to any part of the chain that's heading back to the ground uh and for the spinny light there we go that's my wiring diagram i i can't tell you how useful this is just to have this and frankly if i was doing this as a project i would sit right down and redraw this so it was a little bit clearer for me um but just having this means that when one of these things doesn't work i can actually refer to the diagram oh i got something wrong or i can trace it using the diagram seriously this is like this is both a map of how to get there and a map of where you went at the same time um so now that i have my wiring diagram let's wire up some lights as i said in the beginning this video was brought to you by kiwi co kiwico is a company that hopes to change the future of play by making it engaging enriching educational and also seriously fun they make building kits for kids of all ages that introduce them to the concepts of steam science technology engineering arts and math and they have eight different subscription lines that each cater to different age groups and topics one of my favorite things about kiwi co kits is that they contain everything you need in the box to build what the box needs to build there's no hunting around your house for a piece of scotch tape or paper cup or a rubber ball if it's in the kit it's in the kit i have built several of kiwi coast kits and i have consistently found the experience super rewarding easy simple to understand kid-friendly instructions even on the complex builds and the final thing you end up with is genuinely fun to play with plus if you sign up for kiwi code through tested you can get 50 off your first crate on any subscription by signing in through kiwico dot com slash tested okay there's something i've been doing in this video so far that i'm sure you have done too and that is to hold up the leads of my power and to actually hold it to the leads of the thing i want to power in order to test operation first of all you can only do this with low dc voltages you should never do this with house power obviously and if you're yeah uh don't do that i mean sure of course we're all going to do that because it's efficient but what i really want to tell you is you want some of these alligator clip leads um you almost can't have too many in your shop i have a couple of dozen and i use them constantly so what these do is they give me the ability to connect that to that and this to that and now i don't have to sit there and hold it with my dumb fingers uh and here comes the negative lead and i can connect it up to the negative lead and now i've got the item powered and i can actually look at it and i'm not sitting there with both of my hands out of operation get yourself some clip leads the first step to quality wiring and if you have a couple of dozen i've mocked up entire circuits just using clip leads before i started soldering things before we start to wiring this up i would like to discuss where the power comes from because well over the past period of time there's a lot more of these power banks on the market and we'll include a link to one of these in the in the comments below this is the one i bought for my usb powered soldering iron when i first got it um but it's also become sort of my general purpose shop 12 volt supply i keep it charged uh and this thing lasts forever i can run a costume on this for hours this one in particular is only uh 12 amp hours uh 12 000 milliamp hours i don't mean it'll run one amp for a solid hour which means if you're running a lot less than that you can multiply that that's part of the electronics math um just suffice to say that these fat pack lithium ion battery packs that have a usb out and a 12 volt out are a godsend for my shop and i've got about a dozen of them at any given moment um what i usually purchase are the 12 volt leads uh that you can buy the these uh this standard 12 volt connector and yeah i think we can include a link in the comments below um so i plug it in and this becomes my main output for testing my circuit uh there's a second thing that you can do which is to get a power supply and i had one i had this one which for some reason isn't working so i'm going to use my really old one that does work and this is one that was built by this is a this is this part of the video where i'm taking a tangent to show you something really remarkable which is um this beautiful object that is one of the camera department's balanced power supplies from industrial light magic's model shop uh when we would have lights on a miniature set they would often be of many different voltages uh and we would connect them up 4 volts 6 volts 12 volts 24 volts and then we'd light up a set and we'd take it out to the sound stage and we'd light up the set on the sound stage well they're filming on that set sometimes in stop motion animation or motion control shots that might last for days so every night they go home they turn the lights off when they turn them on in the morning they have to be exactly where they were not close they have to be exactly where they were or the shot is ruined so ilm's camera department built a whole bunch of these balanced power supplies so you could set their voltage with this dial here and then you'd basically put tape and say don't touch this damn thing and every morning you come in and turn on the main light supply and all your lights would go to the same brightness look at this magnificently beautiful thing it is anodized aluminum hand machined i i i was able to purchase this when a disney production called the cinder biters shut down they had bought much of ilms old model shop and i bought a few of these power supplies from them okay so this is the other way in which i iterate uh using using a power supply so i will just hook up into this power supply a couple of banana plug leads and then i get to i get to use alligator clips built right into the alligator leads for powering up my belt so that's what i'm going to do here before i start adding the wiring i do the install or i do the temporary install um simply because that helps me know how long wires should be etc uh so and this one yep that's the other one just gonna throw a little bit of a nut on there so spinny lights are in with the uh with their leads coming up now i'm gonna make some holes for leds one two three i'm gonna do six because i'm already tired four five and i guess i can do the other one at the same time go okay there's my six leds it's not pretty uh and here comes the fan the fan will sit here another thing that is an invaluable tool for wiring is a wire stripper tool there are many ways to do wire stripping the most common is this way and i'm sure you've seen something like this you put this around the wire first of all you cut and then you put it on one of the settings and you peel off the insulation and that's great these work great the thing i don't like about them is when i have a space that is confined and i've got to get myself in there and i'm doing this kind of work like this and then i'm doing this like this like pulling like right right there i have destroyed so many props over the years just by that just by that action of like and then i accidentally yank something over here what is the solution the solution is this automatic wire strippers and we did a video about these a while back there's a link in the comments um here's what these do change your life yeah that's maybe one of my favorite tools in the whole shop uh so i've got the fan i've got the led lights okay so now i want to uh uh make the switch bank so i've got here a piece of aluminum with some holes in it and i'm just going to install some switches into those holes switches often have two hex nuts on them and those are meant for being able to set the depth of the switch to where you want it to be with the goal of the ideal depth is kind of flush with your control panel i rarely worry about that i usually just use these as is and tighten them down with my hands there you go so i'm gonna put three of these in here uh i once bought a whole bunch of super cheap switches from ebay and the part about them that was super cheap was the hex nuts on the shaft tightening those even a little bit would cause them to split oh my goodness this is one i discovered that you can buy on amazon really nice hex nuts for switches and i bought a hundred and i haven't had that problem since um okay so i've got my switch bank i've got my i've got my uh my helmet with all the stuff that i need on it and i've got all my exposed wires how am i going to start connecting all this stuff together well that's where the wiring diagram comes in uh first up i want to wire these guys in in parallel and i'll show you like the most basic if you really wanted to do this right what you would do is you would actually expose a wire and run a jumper across all of these right in situ that's absolutely the lowest profile way to do that the um cheap and fast way to do it is simply to expose a bunch of the wires expose the ends of the wires and connect all the reds together and connect all the blacks together and that is what i'm going to do now on this video um yeah yep okay so now we're going to strip these one two eight nine oh 10 and 11 and 12 are all done great so and again this is not to show you how to professionally wire your costume this is to show you how to do it like i learned how to do it just by catch as catch can and to demystify the process so that you can try it and learn more about it that's how this whole thing works you build up your courage to try something you weren't really comfortable with and it works and then you do something more complicated that's how i've kind of built my entire skill base uh over the years so now let's get into red wires together six so i have all these leads together how do i join them well sure you can solder them all but what if you're lazy and impatient or time is of the essence and you've got to get them together quickly i'm going to show you how to get them together with a thing called a wire nut that's what this is called and it is literally a nut for screwing wires together it has a little tapered spring a conical spring inside and so as i twist it the wires start to get caught up in that spring and as i twist it down it crushes them together creating a kind of its own thread out of the copper in the wires and i forgot one of the reds hold on that's the other thing that's great about wire nuts is that you can undo them to add more pieces to them they come in many different sizes you are going if you're going to get some you should get a bunch um the smallest ones which are the ones i use most often are these bad boys and this is i'll use this for several of these connections these little tiny gray ones are the smallest ones okay so i need one more wire nut for any system i might have to take apart i love wire nuts i use them way more than most people i know so it's definitely a personal choice of mine okay now i've got my switchbank and my wire nuts wired up now it's time to bring in some of my extra wire i love this red and black speaker wire i buy it in different grades on amazon nothing i'm powering here is too power intensive so this wire which is just um no i don't think this is this wire i think this is like a 20 gauge it's not a 22 yeah it's probably a 20 gauge wire and i like the red and black because it helps me and i maintain fidelity to the red and black to hot and cold so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to run leads from each of these three pieces the spinning light the fan and the leds using three different wires so uh i'm gonna cut these i'm gonna cut three lengths uh and let's just uh clear some wires off of there so this is i do a lot of this just prepping wire that i'm about to use if i want to shorten it later i do that's one i'm giving you exactly my first attempt at wiring at everything that i'm working on that's electronic here in the shop this is absolutely how i like test little systems and try stuff out this is how i prototype with electronics in here um no i have not yet dipped in myself to arduino or raspberry pi although i have used them in builds it's usually been under the tutelage of someone else okay how do i connect up this to these well actually on that front i would clear a little more wire from the end of the lead and i would bring each one of these up two into the arrangement with the big wire nut now again there are all sorts of different ways to do this you can connect these all up like i said to a bus bar uh this is just one quick and dirty technique for getting this job done there we go i put the wire there and i just put the wire nut back on and twist it and it's gathering it all together now there is one thing i'm going to do here which i regularly do in the shop which is now i've got this arrangement i don't want that to fall apart so i'm going to add a zip tie i'm going to add a zip tie here for a little bit of strain relief and that just makes sure that the wire nuts aren't doing all of the work and holding this thing together so now i have all the leds together and their leads are coming out here hey let's do a systems check and make sure that they all light up and here's hoping that they do 12 volts if i've gotten this right these will all light up and they all light up success excellent okay so that system's working let's double check and make sure that the spinny light system works black lead red lead and let's do the same on the fan just before i clip and clip excellent oh right i said i was gonna have four switches not three so let's let's do that let's put in this one this is the master power switch okay we're now in the final stage of wiring and i'm going to put away my power supply in favor of my battery the hot lead remember the hot lead goes right to the master switch how does it do that ooh with another technology that i love that uses no solder and that is wire lugs um these are wire lugs they this is a wire lug that's specifically a spade connector that can connect to the end of a switch like that and the way you attach it to wire there are multiple versions but the most common is that you would put it into the hole and use a crimping tool like this to put a crimp in the end and that holds the wire in and that is now a hot lead with a uh a spade connecting female spade connector right that's the male that's the female i don't think i need to get more descriptive than that um and then this guy stays out out in the breeze okay so uh power yep so here's the interesting thing about ground the interesting thing about ground is that while the power gets distributed out to each of these switches in turn by master power the oh right yeah actually i messed that up i still need to do this jumper i'm going to refer to the diagram it goes to the master switch and comes out the other side right and then bridges to one end of the lead of all three of these switches right so yes i need to make a little set of bridge wires that go here and i'm gonna do that using four of these lugs two three four i'm going to cut four little lengths of wire and this is going to be really neat i'm going to use the red wire only because this is a hot lead so first one is that long second one is that long third one is yep the same come on and one last one great so i will clear away some wire on these guys one see i was getting my brain in a muddle trying to figure out how to wire this and i just looked at the diagram and it becomes really clear because i've already drawn it out that's how quickly like the complexity of wiring bends my noggin okay so let's say there are many ways there are many crimpers this is a fairly expensive crimper and i like it uh i've been using them long enough so this goes right there's only one on this one that's great so that's one then on the second one i put two jumpers because i'm jumping from one to the next one so i'm twisting those leads together putting them inside i'm gonna do the same thing on the next one i'm so sure there are all these ways in which i'm doing this in a dumb way uh and your comments in the are greatly appreciated but um you know i'm just doing it the way i figured it out now i connect right that's yeah so power comes in there and comes out here and goes switch number one switch number two switch number three there we go so power's coming in and going to all these three switches now what comes out of these three switches well coming out of one here comes the leds i think that should be our first one so that's this one i put on another wire lug yup and bingo there's the led's hot lead is hooked up all right now it's the fan where's my fan and put that there i have no power hooked up to this yet the battery is not connected so i'm not in danger of shorting anything uh and then the third one is this mini light which is this guy and i'm gonna need an extension on that so i'm gonna make one i'm gonna make one using this little wire nut and i'm gonna put a lug at the other end and wire lug sets are really cheap on amazon uh on anywhere and i know there are probably better brands and worse brands but i i can't tell uh so spinning light there we go so that is all the switches for uh the the hot leads what happens to the negative leads if you remember the negative lead connects right up using a wire nut to uh the negative lead on my leds for instance uh no actually it goes to the fan first yes it goes to the fan first no we'll just cut this here and here's the fan and those connect oh wait and i need a another one that's going to come out of there because i'm going to jump that all the way over to the to the leds yep so i'm going to join those three wires with a wire nut and here comes the jumper out of there and when i connect that up to this one we should have a completed wiring system okay and i know this wait a second wait a second what have i forgotten ah i have forgotten to jump the last lead from the leds to the battery so let me get one more jumper that's the leds and we do one more jumper here from there back to the power from the battery and yeah i've got plenty of wire lead coming out of there this is the moment where it's easiest to release the mysterious blue smoke that makes all electronics work and if you do that they'll just stop working because it's the stuff that makes all the electronics work um i tend not to turn a circuit like this on right away i clean up around it i take a look and then i simply walk through the wiring diagram again okay i've got my power my hot lead from power goes to the master switch it then jumps from that to the leds the fan and the spinning light and the positive the other side of those switches come out and go to the leds to the fan and to the spinning lights and the other side of those three leads comes off and jumps together and connects back up to the main power okay i feel confident that i have a reasonable wiring system so let's try it out wait just give me one second shall we moment of truth here we go remember this is what's going on here and i don't know about you but i have a much easier time parsing and working my way through this than this this makes my brain hurt i always have to have one of these all right let's plug it in all right battery is hot so uh i'm not sure what okay leds are lit hey the leds are lit so then this should light up the fan which it does not and then this should light up the spinning light which it does not it was this dumb switch sorry this switch has this is like some automotive switch and it's got some circuitry in it and it it was messing me up so hold on a sec i'm going to use one of the same switches again i uh i really was wondering if i hadn't done some massive brain fart and then i was thinking am i gonna have to shoot this whole thing again because i was really dumb on it and given that like being dumb on camera is kind of my brand not dumb but like you know unknowing ah am i gonna have to show me we're drawing the wrong wiring diagram for this whole time well we'll see uh so uh new master switch master power is off now it's on leds success and they're brighter than they were before i don't know what it is with this switch but so next thing that should light up is the fan light up you know what i mean and the last one is the spinning light oh did you hear the fan drop that's the voltage drop from running this motor because i basically have all of these things wired in parallel and yeah they're all drawing a certain amount of power you can see this thing changes the speed and the master switch turns it all off and all on right sorry there we go um that's it that's i don't want to say it's wiring 101 it's more like how to think about wiring 101. um i know that there are like really specific industry-specific ways to do all of this stuff but i also know that we all do a lot of self-gatekeeping i'm a i hate gatekeeping wherever i find it but it is most pernicious within our own heads one of the dumbest thoughts that's ever crossed my brain pan was i was 18 and i was looking at my friend craig's welded steel sculpture and thinking to myself welding there's a skill i'm never going to have time to learn like from the vantage point of this many years later like that is crazy that is crazy i was doing gatekeeping against something i didn't even know how to do so if you think of wiring as something that like you just can't do or you just don't know enough to put into a costume i'm hoping this video helped get you across the line to being willing to try it because it's it's easier than you think and don't let anyone tell you different thank you guys for joining me for this tool tip i hope i hope it was useful and as always i'll see you next time i can't believe we didn't finish the video with me wearing this ridiculous helmet but here i'm going to try what could possibly go wrong putting all these wires on my head there we go that's the switch plate are you guys ready turn the power on master switch on oh it's noisy in here yeah i'm sure they'd let me on a plane
2021-08-19 15:32
