Does any body know of a good alternative for the belt Gizmo that won’t cost an arm and a leg?
Well, if you’re looking for practically no accuracy, you could scavenge a circuit board from literally anything, as long as it’s approximately the same size, or you could locate one of the image files of the board, and print it out to stick it on foamboard… Though personally, if you’ve got the cash, Spongeface’s Belt Gizmos are worth every penny.
Totally agreed about Spongefaces stuff. I have most of it lol. But I am trying to do this one on the cheap lol
My first belt gizmo was done pretty cheap. I picked up an old cheap nes game to use as my board. It was quite smaller than I thought (turns out it’s only about 1/2 the size of the case) but I was able to hide it pretty well in the holder.
For the nixie tubes I just hot glued some fuses I got from the hardware store to the top. They were probably the most expensive part of my build and I’m pretty sure they were less than $10.
For the daughter board I bought a small blank circuit board and connected them with one of those static bracelets they have for people who work on computers.
I got those parts back when radio shack was still a thing so I’m not sure where you can get them.
I then glued some wires in random places to compete the look.
All in all I don’t think I spent more than $30. Totally inaccurate but only people like us would know. As part of a uniform set I think it looked pretty good.
Good luck on whateveryou decide.
The guide I used for making my jumpsuit mentioned taking the casing off of an oversized calculator from a dollar store - big circuit board and a liquid-crystal display (they even mention this site as a source for getting accurate knee & elbow pads). Sure it’s not screen accurate but generally the 'Busters I’ve talked to like seeing creative builds, especially if you make it your own. And if anyone gives you flack, you can look them in the face and say “… it’s been 35 years, do you think we’d still use that obsolete tech?”
Whether you go for screen accurate or your own thing, I’m looking forward to seeing what you make.
You’ll have to try a thrift store for the calculator. All dollar-store calculators now use paper circuits. Trust me, I tried–bought the biggest one I could find at Dollar Tree, unscrewed it, and this sad, pathetic sheet of limp paper fell out. However, I saved the LCD screen as the alternative for the nixie tubes, because I figured, “Those things will break off if you lean on them the wrong way, so I might as well replace them with something that doesn’t dig in.”
I looked on ebay for an 80’s LED calculator when I made my first gizmo. It’s far from accurate, but I felt like the character of it was at least closer than the flimsy dollar store ones I was finding. Look for something like a TI-30, and you’ll definitely get the bulk you’re looking for.
Have to take a pic yet, but in mid-September 2017 I went to my local Salvation Army thrift store and bought two or three printer calculators (had to have been a Canon) and took them to bits. One had a too-small circuit board, and the other was way big but looked the part. The daughterboard (i.e. the part that goes on the back of the belt) was the board from my old Pokedex, glued to the back of a pocketknife holster I’d made at Scout camp many years ago.
For the longest time, I had pen sticks (not caps) stuck to the back of the board, but, after the glue broke, I got a dollar-store calculator and stuck the LCD screen on, soldering the wires where I needed to, just to make it look a little more impressive.
EDIT: The holster…I can’t remember what it’s called–“Buddy Pouch,” I think.
In the early days I used to use old pc cards glued into the tape measure holder. You could always make an RGB style out of foam or wood.
The stunt belt gizmos were pieces of leather with a circuit board drawn on it. You could always go that direction.