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I wanted to save this for after my first troop. It didn't seem real before that. Perhaps still surreal. In 2012 at the Calgary Expo I first encountered the 501st "live" and of course I got in line for a photo. At the time I was in love with their costumes and the detail and thought that it must be so much fun for them and maybe one day I could do the same. I had a couple false starts when I was ready to pull the trigger. I was given some contact information for a local TK which was exciting as where I live there is not a lot of members and it is a very large garrison so vast distance between most of us. Well, long story short, he shut me down before I even got out the gate. I'm told he is no longer a member, but at the time he did manage to sour me on the idea. I had a hard time trying to make further contacts and life events always got in the way. I didn't know at the time that I was suffering from depression and anxiety and that was putting the brakes on a lot of things that I wanted to do but just couldn't. Once I got help with those I made advancements in my life and the 501st still was coming up in my mind. In the summer of 2022 I woke up one morning and told myself that now was the time to either do this or forget about it for good. This time it was much easier to connect with the right people and finally get the information I needed. @wook1138 must have answered a thousand questions and with each answer I got closer to the final decision which was, of course, to just do it! There were still a couple stumbling blocks along the way. I knew I didn't have the skills or resources to do the build myself so I did go for the commissioned build then just worked with the strapping and fitting adjustments to tune it for me. While that was still stressful it was still much easier to tackle those kinds of jobs over a scratch build. @revlimiter and @justjoseph63 got me through some stressful times which may have ended up in bailing if they hadn't stepped in and sorted me out. Revlimiter still puts up with me when I need to evaluate what I'm doing. I got things fitting well within acceptable parameters and submitted my final photos on January 8, 2023 (TK23108) then sweated it out for at least 3 years (well maybe 10 days) until the approval email came down the pipe and the Garrison public FB page posted this: Then there was another big event. Only a couple days after approval I had a sudden retina detachment in my left eye and emergency surgery to save the eye. That laid me up for a number of weeks and it didn't heal as well as hoped so I ended up with complications, which are ongoing, and very imbalanced vision between the eyes. I couldn't do any close up work without hours of struggling but there were things I wanted to do to advance the armor further so I worked in short stints and by feel a lot of the time and wondered the whole time if my journey was going to be over before it started. After struggling getting darker lenses in the bucket and fans I couldn't fit my head in with my glasses so trooping would have to be almost done blind. That was a stressful reality as sight lines are already bad enough without that added complication. I was finally able to get new glasses which helped correct some of the every day vision problems but I wasn't all the there yet with the sight clarity and the first opportunity to troop was getting closer and closer. I flip-flopped on the first troop a dozen times in the week leading up but forced myself to go. It was a three day event and much larger than I thought I'd want to do for the first one. Luckily @GilesWoodward saw that there might be a way I could still wear my glasses with the bucket and YES, it worked with some bucket juggling so after the first troop, basically blind, on the first night I was able to see for the remainder of the event! The nerves were going strong on night one and I almost had to be forced into the armor and by day 3 I could hardly wait to get into that armor and troop! The deep end of the pool was exactly what I needed and so was the welcome and all the fuzzy feels that negated that very negative shut-down years ago. Now I still feel like a guy with a plastic pail on my head and it amazes me that others see a Stormtrooper but damn it sure felt right and good! I think that now after a troop that I really earned my TK number and really am a 501st member. Thank you again to all those that got me here! As for the side story from that photo taken in 2012 (left above). I didn't know it at the time but the trooper in that photo was @Starscream3247and I met him last November at a 501st meet and greet but I didn't know that it was him in the photo. Turns out my trip to Calgary got me a photo with one of the troopers who I'll now regularly troop with out of Saskatoon! So at my first troop it seemed fitting to do a full circle and another picture with him but this time I'm in the armor! Bart

Thanks everyone! I'm still glowing from that first troop a week ago. Regarding some of the comments. It is nice to know I am not the only one who felt it was all surreal. Yes, to me I love seeing large numbers of the shinny white. I'm automatically attracted to those photos and quite jealous if I ended up having to man a booth while some of my fellow TKs were out and about without me. That opening scene in ANH always stood out in my mind. I'm hoping in future troops here we can get more of us together for those theme type photo shoots and to troop around a con as the biggest group we can muster and harass interact with some of the attendees. Regarding EIB. Well, there is a big problem with my TD so I'm hoping I can find someone who I can commission to build me a new one to Centurion requirements then I can try for EIB again. Bart

This correct now?

You have them paired right but labeled the wrong legs. The steep angle is for sniper plate. Which is why left shin is shorter than right. So L is the right and R is the left. Good Luck Future Trooper

Looks good from what I can see. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Time to bring this back

Wednesday Update! I've been working on the D ring I picked up some 32mm rectangular loops, I think for bag straps, from eBay. They are 32x19x5mm. To make this work I have adjusted the swivel cap to make it notched so the ring just drops in and is then secured between the swivel cap and end cap. I then cut a small section from the D ring This all then mounts using a 10mm long M3 cap head screw. Looks great? Nope looks way too big. You can see it's way too long, and a bit too chunky. Time to pixel peep the reference: It's not great resolutions but I think the diameter is more like 4mm. The internal measurement looks like it wants to be about 15/16mm. So it's not actually million miles out, though at this scale small differences are a bit obvious. I've just been hunting and found some new loops that seem to be a better match. On to something else I've been working on. Pew pew noises. I got some new parts. The new development board is a Teensy 4.1. This is a significantly more expensive board than the import nano I was using, about 10x more. But it is also far more capable. I have paired this with a small 3W DAC that takes the digital audio from the Teensy and put it out into the 28mm speaker, which is the same sort of size used in lightsabers I think. After a few worrying moments where I thought I'd cooked the board, but turned out to be a bad bread board, I ended up back where I was before with the old setup. I added a 3rd trigger option, currently I imaging I would use this to run the torch from the switch in the front. I don't have to but once hardware is made you can't change it, software is easy to change. The audio wasn't too hard to add, once I read the examples anyway. The default amplification is reasonable, but can be significantly increased if wanted though I found this was distorting the small speaker I have. The basic concept proven I went back to the PCB for this all to go on. The biggest concerns are it needs to be small, and I need to be able to get the SD card out still. This means I need around 10mm clear after the teensy. This is roughly where things are. The capacitor will be laid down to save space. This smooths power in moments of sudden high draw, like say turning on 21 neopixels and a 1W LED all of a sudden. I may or may not use the JST-XH connectors. It will make removal easier, but they are also a bit bulky. Soldering would be more reliable but more of a head ache, JST-PH are also an option, smaller but have lower current capabilities, which will matter on the 4x one as that's going to the external power switch on the side of the magazine. I've opted for small surface mount parts to save room, but will be a pain to solder. To make life easier, all SMD are the special hand solder variants to give a bit of a bigger pad to solder to. There's not a lot left to do on this other than "draw the rest of the owl", that's a reference™. I have a few final details to add to the 3D model. Somewhere flat to attach the neopixels to the barrel, somewhere to mount the speaker and I have an idea to help focus the red light for the mag and hengstler I want to try. Once that's done, I can start printing bits, order some PCBS and do some test building of things.