Giant Nintendo Costume

Like every year , we decided to challenge ourselves for Halloween creating a costumes that is interactive , visually striking and allows us to let go of our imagination!

With this in mind, we decided to build one giant Nintendo from our childhood, and functional to boot it up! For this, we designed an interface to communicate with a projector for the image , a system to run a NES emulator and a good old homemade Nintendo controllers. All needed to be autonomous (no need for external power alimention ) to be able to move and play at any time !

So we built a larger than life Nintendo , allowing to put all the electronic equipment and the projector inside the main body. We also designed two "speakers " to act as screens. These speakers are made of cardboard and plastic, and a projector screen is mounted on one of them, so we can unfold it when needed, attaching it to the other speaker. The Nintendo controllers to allow two people to play , were made entirely with parts that we made using a 3D printer . The frame for them is build out of plywood and foam, covered in fabric and the homemade PLA buttons mounted are in it. The nintendo itself is made out of plastic, supported with a wooden frame. This was all painted out to good old Nintendo colors !

Each controller communicates via Bluetooth with a Rasberry Pi, a mini PC running Linux and it's "open source" interface. Some software coding was needed to setup all this. The bluetooth inputs for the game comes from a hacked-out bluetooth keyboard that we soldered to our homemade switches in each controller, to act like a keyboard for the PC. We then installed in the open-source PC a NES emulator to be installed and configured on it and transmit the image to a projector. Everything is functional with batteries, to move and play Nintendo on the street for Halloween !

The suit asked for time and ingenuity but in the end , having a huge Nintendo, that has no price!