Protogens & Synths, (Now with Mantle Beasts!)

(For Information on the newest Protogen Armor ready for production, head to the Mk.4 Protogen Armor Page! )

And go to the Mantled Beasts page for all that Jazz

Index

Protogen and Synth Commissions

(Refer to the Custom Electronics page to answer most questions about components used in Protogen and Synth suits)

Below are some price estimates for Protogen and Synth suits, and various parts and modifications. As always, these prices are heavily subject to design parameters when we customize your suit! All estimates are in USD 

>>MORE INFORMATION ABOUT PROTOGEN SALES AT THE Mk.4 Protogen Armor PAGE >>

• Complete Protogen Full and Partial Suit (comes with ZillionRoss head (and all head extras including battery pack for partial suiting), and complete Protogen armor with 200 Watt hour Lithium battery life in chest, WLED app controlled WS2812b LED's in hips and shoulders, 12v charger, new kidney-belt mounted tail, Full Bodysuit, knee height digi feetpaws, and handpaws) ~$9600 (~$850 off)

(This option is for someone who all ready has their own Protogen head, and a full body fursuit with hands and feet, and large kidney belt tail. This price is for *just *the armor related parts) >> any fursuit parts you need in addition can be added on at price. 

• Complete Protogen Armor (Chest, shoulders, hips, 200 watt hour Lithium battery life in chest, WLED app controlled WS2812b LED's in hips and shoulders, 12v charger, modification of existing head to work with armor. 12v fan added to head, and microphone or voice modulator. Also comes with smaller 12v battery pack for partial suiting) ~$6000 

Refer to the Custom Electronics page for price estimates of augmentations to your protogen armor electronics

• ZillionRoss type Protogen Head with MAX7219 face (comes with 4 extra custom expressions, 12v fan, and 50 watt hour 12v lithium battery pack and charger)~$1800

  • Add ear hole WS2812b LED's  add ~$100

  • Add Voice Modulator and Amplifier add~$100

  • Add Voice amplifier add~$100

  • Add variable fan speed add~$50

• DragonArtist15 type Synth Head with MAX7219 face (Comes with the same base features as protogen) ~$1800

  • Same upgrade prices as Protogen

• Just printed shell of Protogen Head $150

  • Resin coated and sanded $200

  • Resin coated, sanded, and spray painted $240

• Just printed shell of Synth Head $180

  • Resin coated and sanded $230

  • Resin coated, sanded, and spray painted $280

• ZillionRoss type Protogen Visor (comes dyed) $70

• DragonArtist15 type Synth Visor (Comes dyed) $70

• Additional face Max7219 expression coding:

  • Additional static eye expression $10

  • Additional dynamic eye expression(2-frames) $15

    • $3 for each additional animation frame

• NON-WLED WS2812b coding (refer to prices in the Custom Electronics page)

Thank you for your patronage! Remember to message me through Telegram or Twitter for any questions or commission requests!

Protogen and Synth Features

Voice Systems

Control Systems

Other Electronics

Other Armor Components

Vacuforming and Helmet Modeling

One of the most critical components on any Synth or Protogen, and the hardest to make, is the Visor. Originally I purchased a webbed defect visor from Kaiborg  for 20 bucks and dyed it to practice. 

Recently I decided to make my own vacuformer from scratch. Not gonna lie, the thing is scary. it needs 240V power to get hot enough so I wheel it over and steal the dryer outlet when i need it. I pretty much just attached heater wire to ceramic terminals with the right resistance to put put around 2.5 kilowatts of heat. When you plug it in it buzzes very loudly. Everything inside it is conductive. I love it. Its literally just a giant fancy toaster that plugs into a shop vac.

With this vacuformer I was able to make my own bucks and ultimately visors using the Zillion Ross models. This looks far better on Protocake 3.0 because its actually meant to fit that shell. The Kaiborg shell i'd been using never quite looked right on zillions. 

Zillion Ross is the one who modeled the Protogen head shell AND accompanying visor buck (Bucks are the solid mold you perform the vacuform on). The Files for both can be found Here. I modified the Buck files to get them to fit in an Ender 3 in 5 sections, they can be found Here. 

DragonArtist15 is the one who modeled the Synth Shell AND accompanying visor buck. The files can be found Here. I modified the Shell and buck to fit in an ender 3 in multiple sections. I also modified to make the back-scales separate pieces to be printed. The folder with all of these files can be found Here.

Once The Shell / Buck Parts get loosely hot glued together, the 3D base is coated with a mix of fiberglass resin and corn starch thickener. The resin/starch mix is perfect for sanding. The Bucks in particular needed sanded very smooth to make clean even vacuum molds.

My Vacuformer pulls 2ftx2ft sections of plastic. Its a little oversized for bucks but works fine. I can vacuform with a variety of plastics, but most protogens agree the best material to use is 6mil (0.06in) thick PETG plastic sheet. PET (polyethylene terepthalate is basically pop bottle plastic. The type G  means added glycol, which augments strength and durability). 

Finally, the visors get dyed carefully in a stockpot with fabric dye (Usually Idye Poly) at 140F  to desired darkness. A caveat of visors is you want them to be dark enough people cant see in but not so dark they make your LED's barely visible. The latter occured on V1 Protocake. My solution to this is to add a piece with black screen that mounts in front of your face. This prevents people and flash photography from seeing in, but your LED screens can still shine bright.

Mk.1-Mk.3 Protogen Armor Modeling

As previously mentioned, this armor comes from the Nicoreda VRchat protogen base found Here. The armor model was modified in blender to make it conform to a human body better, then the model was decimated to reduce the polygon count. It was then Imported into a program called Pepakura to turn it into cuttable/foldable shapes to be printed onto standard letter paper.The letter paper was then glued to stock card with super77 adhesive, and the tedious process of  building the cardboard armor could commence. It was done with regular hot glue and scissors. Once completed the shell was fiberglassed in a tent and vigorously sanded before getting a smooth topcoat consisting of fiberglass resin and corn starch as thickener. 

These armor shells are tough and rigid and can be bolted directly to. No amount of sunlight or hot cars or any sort of torture will warp or ruin them. They essentially have the same strength as a motorcycle or football helmet.  

Code and Wiring

  I am most experienced with Arduino IDE but I plan to learn Python and Micropython. Most Microcontrollers will work with ArduinoIDE, including Teensy's, ESP's, and RaspberryPi Pico's / Zero's. I have built some scripts from the ground up, but coding usually involves reverse engineering chunks of other peoples scripts and gluing them together to do what you want. Below is a list of some scripts that i've written and modified for arduino IDE. Any modified scripts are accompanied with a link to the original script. 

Original JtingF/Kaiborg script for maxx7219 protogen face

My first modification of protogen code, not optimized

Second modification of protogen code, still with issues

Third modification of protogen code. This is the version I currently use

Script for my animated LED goggles. Uses FastLED library. Written by me

Script for Xeons arduino controlled eye, neck, and mouth lights. Written by me.

This is a script I wrote that turns note inputs into buzzer frequencies to make buzzer music

This one plays the Spamton theme from delta rune lmao        

The electronic schematic of Protocake has gone through several reworks over the last year. Below you can see 2 low resolution versions of the schematics, and links to the high-res image files. 

Protocake Mk.3 High Res

Protocake Mk.2 High Res

Protocake prime/1.0 High Res   

Protocake Prime

A year ago I started my protogen journey and printed the Zillion Ross head. I started very basic and just wanted to see how EL-wire would look as the face. It was ok but way too dim with the visor covering it. Instead I turned the face into a cute prop after. So it was time to go for the max7219 displays. I spent a lot of time learning basic arduino code and breathed in *plenty* of solder fumes. I got a little too ambitious with the first head. I was trying to stuff way too many electronics into my face without any regards to weight, power consumption, or vision. The original goal was to add a HUD using an old phone and webcams. It sort of worked, but fitting all that in the Zillion head would be impossible, and the webcam-android system was very crude. 

Protocake 1.0

After messing around with this prototype head for a while I got crackin' on the armor. See the Mk.1-Mk.3 Armor modeling section for specifics on the process. I also Printed another ZillionRoss head, this one got fiberglassed and sanded. I redid the head but with way less extraneous electronics than before. Battery power would be supplied in the Armor. 

The finished armor was drilled and bolted with all the necessary straps. For 1.0, the hips were suspended by a fiberglass girdle just like the VRchat model. The girdle was then suspended by the chest armor. I made the weird decision of having all the fur be made into sections that only spanned joint gaps, and velcro'd into the inner edge of the joints. It was very weird and hard to connect. This got changed out for just using an undersuit later. 

The chest armor housed a large (probably too large) speaker for the voice modulator, which was an adafruit waveshield on an arduino also in the chest. The arduino received input from a breakout mic in the head. A persistent signal noise could be heard from the voice speaker due to the matrix displays proximity. The waveshield ended up getting swapped because of its finickey nature.

The Armor was also fitted with a 200watt stereo amplifier in the chest and a bluetooth receiver. The stereo fed hip speakers through wire harnesses in the girdle. During MCFC, I had several of these pins get damaged and solder joints fail. 

This was a time crunch and I laid aside many of the things I wanted to add to get it done in time. Although very difficult to wear, it was still a success. I was able to wear him for 2 days at the con. The helmet had a weak 5v fan and it was not keeping the visor from horrendously fogging up. I ended up removing the visor for the latter half of the con to see. 

Protocake 2.0

2.0 aimed to work out all the kinks of the 1.0 armor, some successfully, some unsuccessfully. The date to have this done by was Anthrocon in July. Firstly the girdle was removed and replaced with crotch fur attached to the waist fur and leg fur, making something to the effect of fur overalls. the shoulder fur was permanently attached to the chest armor. This would be a problem later as it made the chest hard to get in and out of and restricted circulation in my armpit. 

Instead of being supported at the girdle, the hips would now get directly attached to the chest. This would be the biggest mistake of the Mk.2, as the weight of the entire suit was being placed directly on my shoulders. It made me exert way too much energy and I overheated over and over because of this. Being July in Pittsburgh didnt help either. I also added auxilary mounting points for 2 additional lead acid batteries on the backside of the armor around where the shoulder blades are. This was a good location for them and I think it looks really cool, but they do add significant weight to the tune if 12 lbs. 

I also added Lighting to the hips and shoulders with 12v black light LED strips. These are very low tech and i'll be using WS2812 addressable LED's in commissions. I also painted all the armor with black light reactive and glow paint. combined with the black light LED's it does look really cool. 

The other problem I had with the Mk.1 was incessant fogging. to mitigate this, in the Mk.2 I carefully built a screen mesh face visor with 14ga wire supports just to test it out. It actually worked surprisingly good and obviously I had no issues seeing with this method, however the other critical failures means the screen mask was barely taken advantage of. It looks ok from a distance but up close its a little rough. 

I added a piezo buzzer and built the code to make little music cues when you switch between face expressions, along with adding a lot of face expressions, some of which are dynamic and make little buzzer noises. 

I also exchanged the adafruid wave shield voice modulator for a velleman mk.171 kit. I was pleasantly surprised at the fidelity and volume of the little board and it will be my go-to from now on. I was however, still getting a lot of noise from the voice speaker due to the matrix displays. Along with the velleman, I split the amplified output from the LM386 and sent it to a LM3915 based 10-segment audio level indicator. It and the velleman kit are meant to run on 9v but i've been using them with 12v successfully for some time now. Any addition of buck regulators between them and the batteries causes additional noise. The 12v supply for the LM3915 allows me to put 2 LED's in series for each segment and it works great. 

Finally, I made a small chest mounted cabinet out of wood with a 3watt speaker and slots for 2 sets of 3 series 18650 batteries. This was the first version of my chest harness for partialing in Protocake. It worked ok but the elastic I used let it bounce around too much on my chest , and the 18650's were not lasting long enough. 

Protocake 3.0

Well, Anthrocon was a bit of a let-down but I had worked out a lot of kinks. The first thing that I fixed for 3.0 was the weight distribution. This time I added mount rings to my Yellowcake tail kidney belt, to attach rubber bungees from the hips. This distributed half the weight on my hips and was way better. I also re-padded the insides of everything, particularly the chest to make shoulder weight better. I also ditched the weird fur-overalls thing and opted to just make a complete fur undersuit that is totally detached from the armor. This is definitely the best method and the one i'll be using in commissions. 

The face screen mesh was pretty cool, but didnt look that great. I wanted a legit protogen visor so I built a vacuformer and prepped a ZillionRoss buck and vacuformed some protogen and synth visors. You can see all the detail of this process in the Vacuforming section of this page. I still had the issue of balancing dye darkness for the visor. I wanted the LED's to be clearly visible under most circumstances, but not let people see my face inside, even with flash photography. My solution to this was to add a small wire/black mesh screen just over the front top of the face where I see out of. This just snaps on underneath the visor. You definitely cant see in, but I can easily see out, and my LED's can shine out too. The zillionross visor also extended out way farther and fit way better than the Kaiborg one i'd been using. as a result, I decided to extend out the steel strap for the matrix mounts, basically just stretching the whole face out slightly. Arguably it looks way better this way. 

The incessant microphone noise was driving me nuts. After a full day of tearing things apart and re-probing over and over I eventually realized all i needed was capacitors. A 10nF ceramic capacitor across the microphone wires, and a total of 4 1000uF 16v electrolytic parallel capacitors across the 12v power at the voice modulator power input 100% solved my problem.

I was still going to have some fogging issues, so I also added a super fast 0.5 Amp 12v server fan to the face and the chest. These things really pump it out. To have them maybe, not pump it out so hard, I powered each with a variable DC buck converter. I removed the tiny trimpot usually responsible for adjusting the voltage and soldered on wires to a 1Kohm potentiometer. This gives me full speed control via knob for the fans. I also ran 3 series LED's and a resistor parallel to the fan. As you turn the power up the LEDs behind the fan glow giving a cool effect. 

I also added power and audio connectors, and shoulder U-bolts for a mobile DJ table i've yet to try out. Check DJing, Audio and Automotive to see it. The shoulder LED connectors were replaced with barrel jacks to prevent prong bending like before. The hip connectors were replaced with 4-pin Aviator connectors and tough coil cord to allow for movement without kinking, and prevent momentary disconnects in all scenarios. The Neck connector was replaced with coil cord going to a USB-A connection. Additionally, I ran a connection between the goggles and back of the head. This way the goggles also get powered from the same source, infact *everything* on this suit is now powered from the same source. 

I also rebuilt the speaker/battery box on the partial harness. I made a tougher EVA foam harness where a heavy lead acid battery firmly mounts between your shoulders. Its a good spot for weight and doesn't bounce around on you. I took apart an old Jordan geiger counter and used the meter hole as a mount hole for the 3 watt speaker from before. It sits right over your sternum, and a small green voltage display adds a nice aesthetic. 

At the same time I had been working on Digi-stilt feet for Yellowcake. They add about a foot to my height, and combined with the ears i'm about 8 feet tall in it all. I decided to go for broke and test them out with Protocake at WPAFW. To my great amazement, they actually worked.  

With Protocake Mk.3 i've worked out all of the big issues with wearing a protogen fullsuit. The Mk.4 will seek to blend all the improvements into one package with a bow on top and make their production far easier. Expect progress very soon!

Mk.4 Protogen Exosuits >>READY FOR PRODUCTION

Synth Exosuits (Coming Later)

Experimental (Coming Later)

Coelacant Heads (Coming Soon)