The Real Ghostbusters 1984 Kenner Proton Pack

CAUTION - Video Contains Lights and Lasers

Seeing as the much anticipated 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' movie is being relesased this coming summer, I thought I'd do a little revamp project in honour of the original toy. At the tender age of five, my parents were awesome enough to have graced me with one of those Ghostbusters Proton Packs, there may still be one lurking in your attics.

I modelled the parts using the size of the toy pack as a guide with calipers. By simulating the original pack in 3D space I could gauge an accurate size for the printed parts. Most of the parts were 3D printed in PolyLite Blue PET-G (supplied by 3d Filaprint) on the creality CR-10 Mini. Although some parts were also printed using SLS printers and the Anycubic Photon printer in clear and grey resin.

The Particle thrower is controlled by the Prop-Maker FeatherWing by Adafruit. I programmed the board using CircuitPython to control a switch, push button, RGB led, 4 Ohm 3 Watt speaker, Neo pixel Jewel and the built-in accelerometer to activate the sound and light effects.

I made a PVC pipe frame and bolted it to the back of the pack, I also added some stickers and straps from an old backpack to finish it off. All in all the project took about a month and alot of that time was spent learning the programming language. I'd never really soldered any boards before so this was a nice little learning curve and im pretty pleased that I was able to add something back to a simple toy that brought me and others a lot of happiness as children. Hopefully my kid will get as big a kick outta playing with this as I did.

Be sure to check out the full project - https://bit.ly/3coOppI

Thanks for watching