Power Rangers Energem

My son has recently discovered the Power Rangers on Netflix and of course as the nerdy dad who likes to build I was interested of what I could make for a quick weekend project. After some searching on Thingiverse I found thing 2563021, a perfect small project for me to mod. I had seem some people making similar objects with colors, but I decided it needed to glow like in the show.

• Thin computer cable (only about six inches)
• Push button (harvested mine from an old printer)
• Three LR44 batteries
• One Bright LED
• Gray PLA filament
• Glow in the dark PLA filament

So the crystal STL file was a solid object. I loaded the file into Tinkercad and hollowed it out by making a duplicate hole and centered it before performing the join. I attempted to allow for one mm of material on each side. I then removed the ends so that I could put the electronics inside.

Once I was confident I had the correct designs I threw gem stl into Slic3r and printed it at 0.3mm layer height with glow in the dark filament. Next I loaded in the two ends into Slic3r (had to make sure these were flat on the plate because the models were angled off for some reason). Again I printed this at 0.3mm layer height but used silver filament.

I will admit here I made a slight mistake and didn't put a hole in one of the ends for the button to go through. This was easily rectified with the drill as you can see in the photo.

So I realized after I got the batteries that I needed some type of holder for them. Back to tinkercad and with my calipers i made a little half cylinder for three batteries to fit in. I had the innards of a burnt out surge protector which has these nice straight copper strips, I cut two small pieces off used those as the positive and negative end leads. Just because I am being a bit lazy, I used some blue painters tape (it's what was in arms reach) to hold the batteries in.

So the positive lead was soldered to the positive wire of the LED. The negative wire of the LED was soldered to one end of a wire, the other end of the wire was soldered to the push button. One end of a second wire was soldered to the negative lead, and the other end to the corresponding pin on the pushbutton. Now I couldn't find my glue gun (i'll admit the office is a bit messy) but I did have my 3D pen on me, it works out very well for holding the pushbutton in place at the top end.

At this point I realized that I couldn't push the pushbutton, so I found a small scrap piece of plastic from an old print and superglued it to the pushbutton, just enough so I could push it in. If it's too big then you may detact the button from the glued mount.

I carefully slid the battery into the gem, tested it to make sure everything worked and then glued the end caps on with some super glue. Works like a charm on the first try.

My son immediately loved it and then I showed him that it glows in the dark after usage. Not too bad for only really spending maybe an hour building it (with the exception of print time).