Jumping on the full size spirit mod train! I've had really good luck sourcing cosmetic parts from Etsy (BIG shout out to Sean Charlesworth and GreatScottPropShop for quality products and rapid fast shipping). As for electronics, I've been adapting them from various other projects. I really enjoy the DIY part of building out my pack, so as much as possible I avoided off the shelf solutions which I acknowledge isn't everyone's jam. If that's something that sounds like fun to you, keep reading


First thing I did was revamp a few Arduino projects I'd previously used with my Spirit 80% scale pack to work with a state machine. This greatly simplified the logic of the pack and made it 10x easier to work with. I've published the code on GitHub, but the README leaves out a lot of the slimy details (like hardware, wiring, etc). If people are interested I'll backfill these details.
https://github.com/jordanbyron/gb-proton-pack I used some mouth words to describe why a state machine and some of the coding choices I made were so impactful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X4x8cy23yI Also if you just want to see the pack in action I've got that video here:
https://youtu.be/ZlHGk2GJUO0 I'll post a few pictures of the interesting mods I made. Because I wanted to make sure I was "Halloween Ready" I didn't end up taking on repainting and replacing the hardware on the main pack body, but that's on my list of "things to do". I also hope to introduce a pack attenuator.
Motherboard is MDF painted black and cut to fit the shell. I decided to use rare earth magnets to hold the shell to the motherboard. The fit is nice and snug and the majority of the weight is anchored to the motherboard itself. I wore this thing trick-or-treating all Halloween 2023 and had zero issues. I have a poorly manufactured ALICE frame attached to the motherboard via a few 3D printed stand offs. The motherboard also has my 2.1 audio system and batteries attached to it.




The wand underwent the most modifications, including adding working toggle switches, buttons, opening up the vents, bondo filling the existing holes, cutting a slot for the bar graph, and fitting the aviation connector into the wand hilt. I've also added a volume control / push button inside the front knob (inspired by arpehem's build). The end result allows me to switch the pack into "music" mode and FF through different tracks while still enabling the normal animations and functionality to play out.



