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The Protogen Lives by tapewolf

The Protogen Lives

tapewolf

Okay, so around the end of 2020 I bought a Protogen kit to try and use up some of the LED matrices I'd accumulated while designing the eye systems for Xerian and other Synths made by Raptor's Den. It didn't help as I decided I wanted creepy red eyes, and ended up not using the massive pile of green matrices after all.

Anyway, priming, smoothing and painting a protogen is hard work and uses scary chemicals. Making protogen ears is not easy either, especially if you're hopeless at working with fabrics. As such, I could see that this was going to be a bit of a train wreck and so I decided to make it part of his character, hence the occasionally glitching out with "KiLL" appearing over his eyes, and the Trioptimum logo on his cheeks.

Nonetheless, after about 18 months of him sitting on my workbench taking up space, I decided to finally sort him out. And here he is, an abomination held together with hot glue and wishful thinking. But a completed protogen nonetheless.

I ended up calling him 'Quirk', although I considered a few like "Scrapheap", "Junkyard" or even "Sausage" because you don't want to know how it was made.

The software and hardware systems were the only bits I was really confident in being able to pull off, and indeed there are a few nice touches. The cheeks are OLED displays and can be reprogrammed if I decide to ditch the "Mad Protogen built by SHODAN" look, and there's also code to make him shut down in the presence of a Protogen Override Key. (And restart him with a Rescue keyfob)

For that matter the cheek logos were very nearly an ominous splatter effect after an accident involving red filter and spray paint. But I wasn't able to recreate it for the other cheek, and anyway a programmable logo kicks ass, even if it's fairly small.

The helmet, visor and inner frame were bought from Kaiborg. Thanks also go out to sofox for the crash course in the Arduino IDE one Scotiacon, and also showing me how to prepare 3D printed material for painting. Without Raptor's Den I wouldn't have got into LED matrix programming, and it was Chip the Protogen at Confuzzled, who persuaded me to finally finish the thing while exchanging war stories about protogen building.

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