I help you get started with LEDs - Cosplay Tutorial

this video is sponsored by skillshare thanks so much for helping out our channel hello guys this is vetlana from kami cosplay and today i wanted to give you a crash course and basic introduction to leds and how to install them into your fancy costumes and props and you know i already made a tutorial a few years ago but i was very short and very briefly so today i wanted to take a little bit more time and explain you everything in detail you need to know also in case you never saw that before you are scared of electronics and have no idea about math and physics just like me by the way this video is for you so i want to keep it very simple very beginner friendly and i hope it will be inspiring and helpful so in case you're a little bit intimidated when it comes to leds and electronics and i can totally understand that because i feel the same just let me show you why leds are awesome so here for example is my symmetra blaster from overwatch and it looks already pretty cool but you know what makes it even better if i turn on the built-in leds so i can take this finger off and under that is actually the battery and also the switch hidden so i turn the leds on attach this thing again and as you can see it lights up here so here are some leds and like here are also some leds built in and the blaster looks now much more convincing much more futuristic and just so much more awesome and this here is my pip boy from fallout 4 which benny made for my costume so here it looks already pretty cool as you can see it's completely 3d printed but i can also turn on the lights here and like this is this is like a tiny little detail but it makes the whole thing already much more believable and like much more exciting and especially like installing the lights was only a few dollars maybe it was super quick and also super fun and like the best thing is that once you understand the basics you can go even further and maybe you will also become quite obsessed with leds like i for example i start installing leds into all of my projects for example i did bulbasaur from shadowlands which had like over 500 leds i'm also working right now on my demonic brigitte costume which has now in total i think over 800 leds like i cannot stop but it's incredibly fun but yeah if you want to get there you have to first understand the basics and this is why i'm making this tutorial today so let's first put this stuff away and grab some leds [Music] so here is my led box i have some wires i have some battery holders some switches and leds in different colors before we get started though let me first show you what an led actually is so this is a simple led a blue one to be precise and as you can see it has a long leg and also a short leg and also a translucent head and that's where the magic happens no idea how it happens but it happens and this is not important so if you actually grab a free vault button cell battery 2032 to be precise and just slide it in between it lights up magic however it works only one way so if you turn the battery around it doesn't work it doesn't work because the plus needs to go to the long leg and the minus needs to go to the short leg and you can do just the test like that like i also totally always forget it so just do this little test just work work that's good and then you know how to install the battery and the led and in case you are worried that you will burn down your house if you get into electronics don't worry you will be fine like i'm doing this now for 17 years i have no idea what i'm doing and my house is still here so you know don't worry like uh these electronics are very small very basic and really nothing will really happen except maybe you get like a shortcut and something get maybe a little bit hot that will be fine you will be good just keep on watching this video you will you will you can do it you can do it to be exactly precise the blue led actually has 2.7 volt and yeah and the battery has revolt so some people will actually argue now that you need a resistor you don't need to resist it will be fine but yeah basically you can just put on more leds on here and as you can see it lights up as well but but you know when you actually put on an orange one in orange one this one don't like it is it because the orange one has actually 2.2 volt and this one has 2.7 volt and they don't like to get mixed up that much the green ones are pretty similar i think they have also 2.6 or something like that so this works as well i also have like um a teal one this should work as well there tier one see it works but the red ones have again like around 2.2 i think the red one won't work you see red one don't work they don't like it and as you can see like you can totally take this already as a third get and like just put some tape around that super professional and yeah this is already like your circuit as you can see you can totally put this already into your costume it might be a little bit more difficult to turn the circuit on and off to switch the battery but as you can see it already works this setup is a little bit unefficient though especially if you want to reach your battery and change it uh during a convention day so now i want to show you how to install a slide switch so you can turn off the leds and also how to exchange the battery so you need a battery holder to turn the circuit on and off we need a slight switch this is my favorite model since it's so small and easy to handle and very easy to build in into small custom and props and we also need a battery holder this is specifically for the battery i want to work with the free volt 2032 so the battery needs to fit into that also as mentioned you need the led and to connect everything we need some wire as well and how to connect everything i'm going to show you in the next step before we get started though we still need a few basic tools don't worry though they are quite affordable so first you need a soldering iron so here is mine super basic it has 45 watts and yeah very cheap cost me like 20 bucks or something like that in addition to that as you can see i have a helping hand tool a very optional but a great help for your project and also i have like this metal fluff tool to clean the tip of my soldering iron everything very basic then you also need some lead-free solder like this one here got it from electronics store also highly recommend to get some heat shrinking tubing i actually got this one from my online led order so this came completely for free and it fits perfectly over my leds you will later see what to do with it then you also need some wire to connect everything and i'm using a 0.14 square millimeter double colored wire as you can see for all of my led projects and then last but not least i also highly recommend a wire stripper like this one was also 15 euros or something like that super cheap and an absolutely amazing investment it can cut wires super fast as you can see and it also can strip wires super fast so amazing tool highly recommend to get one for yourself so our project for today is we grab an led and we connect it with a wire then comes a battery holder and to be able to turn the whole thing on and off we place a switch in the middle so first we have to strip the wires one for the led and one end for the battery holder then we have to separate the wires completely for it like that we have to drill the ants nice and pretty all the ends nice and pretty then we grab the led and have to connect the plus pull to one of these legs however since we totally forgot what the right leg is for that actually we can make a task and just slide the battery in one way it doesn't work like that no no that works like that turn the led around and it lights up this way we figure out what the plus pole of the led is it is the long leg so we have to connect the red wire to the long leg so here i'm using my helping hand and place it just here then i cut off some heat shrink tubing around two centimeters pull it over the wire so and just line them up like that afterwards i just heat up the area a little bit and add some solder here so afterwards i do exactly the same with the black wire so that's good enough then i pull up the heat shrink tubing here just over the soldering area what just like that what and heat it up with some fire a heat gun totally works here as well by the way you can also use your soldering iron but it's a little bit not so precise and this is how it looks like so then we do exactly the same with the battery holder again we add some heat shrink tubing here so and to figure out which ones of these legs is actually the plus ball we have to turn it around and then we see like a tiny little plus here on this contact so this leg is the plus pole the positive pole and it will get the red wire so keep this in mind i attach it to my helping hand and roughly do this here and a little bit of solder here whoa wow super professional oh my god okay then i do the same with the other leg so and add some more soldering here like my soldering is actually really bad but it does the job you can clean it up a little bit afterwards because it looks like crap it's okay and then a huge ring tubing comes over these ends as well we add a little bit of heat here as well so super careful be careful what does the job does the job stop okay so looks already quite good like at this point you can already add the battery and it will light up so as you can see i know we want to be able to turn off the circuit at any time so now comes a slight switch for the next part we basically just grab one of these wires well make a cut in between so as you can see strip the ends pop then we add some heat shrink tubing on top so and again the slide switch goes to our helping hand so now to attach this light switch we need an outer leg and middle leg doesn't matter which one you take it will work anyway but basically an outer leg and middle leg at this point i highly recommend to ask a family member boyfriend friend or any someone for help then we solder this on carefully ha it worked now we attach the other wire as you can see this step is a little bit tedious and getting some help would be very nice but benny is right now holding the camera and then add some solder here as well as you can see i actually have some very shaky hands but this doesn't stop me to do electronics to really make sure that everything is sold out on properly because as you can see when i turn around the switch there are still some blank wires so i cover these ones with shoulder as well carefully my soldering joints literally look like crap however i still do fancy electronics so if i can do it you can do it as well so i just pull up my heat shrink tubing here over the soldering joints heat up this area carefully as well to let everything shrink properly okay looks good and then we add the battery it lights up but now you can turn it off if you followed along on this tutorial congratulations to your very first working circuit i hope you was able to see that doing electronics isn't complicated at all and it's actually super fun and easy but now we can do a little bit more fancy stuff before we keep on going though i want to quickly thank today's sponsor skillshare the world of electronics is fun and exciting and something you might also want to check out is mark franfelda's introduction to arduino mark is the editor in chief of the make magazine and knows how to explain electronics in an easy and beginner friendly way i use the arduino in plenty of my own projects and it's a great tool for fancy special effects in costumes and props the course is super inspiring and covers a lot about basic electronics like motors speakers and blinky leds mike explains everything you need to know to get started to play around with the arduino so if you're curious check out the course other than that skillshare offers online classes for fine art photography crafting film and video production and so much more so make sure to check it out the first 1000 people to use the link in my description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership so hurry up and check out all these helpful classes thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring this video now let's continue and now back to the fancy electronics so this part is quite simple but now you might wonder how to install more than one led to help you understand the whole thing a little bit better here is the schematic of the circuit for more leds you basically just have to cut open the wire and add more leds here just keep in mind that more leds will drain the battery much faster so this setup with one led and one three volt battery holds for around 11 hours you can calculate that but yeah basically this is like 11 hours so if you want to use more leds and a bigger setup you have to divide the 11 hours through the amount of leds so let's say you are using three leds so 11 divided by 3 is 3.66666 so roughly four hours would be still enough for short convention day but you would still have to change your battery so what is the solution for that problem it is a bigger battery so here is basically the same setup as you can see i'm using here three leds here is also again the tiny slide switch to turn everything on and off and here i'm using a 9 volt battery which is much stronger and doesn't drain out so fast with three leds the setup is much bigger but according to my calculations uh it will actually last for 27.5 hours so basically for a whole convention weekend so now you probably wonder what happens if you take this 9 volt battery hook it up to a single led and then do it even ever have to exchange the battery because then it actually runs forever right well not exactly basically um a three volt battery also needs free volt to run this is the reason why this one works so nice it is a three volt battery with a three volt led works perfectly and also we have here three volt leds like in total nine volt if you uh take them together and with a nine volt battery so it works perfectly fine but if you actually want to run only two leds you have to replace the last three volt which you're basically not using with a resistor and the resistor basically takes the the extra free volt and just turns it into heat and here you have to do some calculations on what kind of resistor you need how big it needs to be and blah blah blah but well you can totally do this with a calculator and some math and some physics but if you're lazy and stupid like me you just google for a resistor calculator type in your circuit type in the size of your battery and the amount of leds and their volts and then you're good and get the perfect resistor you need so to replace your three volt led in your nine volt circuit you need a resistor like here this one is 150 ohm large and it has the color coding so you can see how big the resistor actually is and as you can see this is like brown green brown golden so if you want to use two leds for your circuit with a 9 volt battery basically just replace your third led with 150 ohm resistor and you're good and now let's quickly demonstrate what happens if you're using a tiny little led with a very too strong battery hey oh oh it smells it smells it burns so as you can see the led is dead it smells a little bit but nothing burned down as you can see the house is still here everything is fine and if you say this is already a little bit too much for me too complicated that's fine that's totally fine i was there as well and i know electronics are complicated and scary so to help you out to install fancy leds into your costume i wrote my basic led book and here i also include pre-calculations for up to seven leds so you know which kind of resistors you need which kind of batteries you have to use and everything everything is completely pre-calculated and shows you exactly how to do that also it includes plenty of basic tutorials how to diffuse lights how to install leds into your costumes and all the things you need to know so check out my led book oncomingcosplay.com so i hope i was able to show you that even though this is totally doable and fine that this here is also not complicated at all and that you can also install fancy leds to your costumes as well even if you're a beginner and have no idea about electronics so what can you do once you became a master of fancy led electronics well as i said you can install them into all of your costumes and props make everything much better and coming back to my metra blaster as an example here i actually installed 12 leds in total so here are three there are three here are free as well and on the other side we have also three more i made basically a parallel connection with three leds in each strand here's the circuit by the way and also as i also showed you before here is a 9 volt battery this here is the switch to turn everything on and off and to close everything it's actually attached with simple magnets so the highest part is actually not doing the electronics themselves but figure out a way how to install everything and also hide the electronics another important part is also to diffuse your leds so instead of seeing just three points you can use like a diffusing material so you know if you just hold it more for way and everything the area gets a nice even light this way for that i'm using led foam or plastisote 45 this one here is five millimeter and you can also get it also in 10 millimeter or two millimeter and yeah i'm using it for plenty of my own led projects and especially if you're working a lot with led foam and foam in general is like a great combination so here for example i also used a few layers of led foam to diffuse the light and so the whole light looks actually nice and even instead of just being three dots well and now some of you probably wonder but what about serial connections what about parallel connections what about this and that and like electronics is such a huge topic and i already tried to cover plenty of other tutorials in my other videos so please check out the rest of my channel for more led tutorials however i hope this was a good introduction into the world of basic leds i hope i was able to you know make this whole topic a little bit less intimidating and i hope now you really want to get into electronics yourself and install some fancy lights for props and costumes and if you actually wonder what kind of tools and materials we are using just check out the video description down below because there we actually linked everything you need also if you still have any questions or feedback left just write down a comment in the video as well and if you have no idea what's right just join the corgi squad right on corgi and support us with the youtube algorithm and i'm sure you're also pretty curious what we are currently working on so for that just check out our instagram our facebook and our twitter because there we constantly post costume and prop progress and yeah other than that as always like and subscribe hit the notification bell so you know exactly when the next video is coming also consider to support us on patreon if you like our videos also thanks so much again to all our patreons and well see you very soon and don't forget to buy my led book on carmo cosplay.com bye

Channel: KamuiCosplay

Views: 340,168

Keywords: Kamui Cosplay, Cosplay Tutorial, Cosplay Progress, DIY, Do it yourself, how to, leds, lights, led lights, led tutorial, led circuit, simple leds, simple circuit, led how to, electronics, cosplay electronics, soldering leds, soldering tutorial, soldering, beginner

Id: vX2twvU-Rlw

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020