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I give permission for FISD to repost my photos on social media in an appropriate fashion. Troop 1, 2 and 3: Saskatoon Entertainment Expo May 5-7, 2023 / raised funds for the Pattison Children's Hospital. This is the most members ever at this event from the various clubs. The last few months have seen a lot of new people join as rebels, 501st or mandos. We raised funds for the children's hospital in Saskatoon. I'm going to give some background on this journey in the sound off thread however for now I will just say that life getting in the way of life may not have allowed this troop to happen. The week leading up to it I was flipping back and forth about even attempting it in part because I was being thrown into the deep end instead of a nice small first event. But I landed on the side of going and then the next thing you know I was there. I think in retrospect the deep end of the pool was the way to go as I got to do many jobs in a busy setting so learned to adapt and be flexible with everything very quick and for an OCD type of guy that says a lot! This one begs a caption. I took the last shift of the first evening because I wanted the least number of people around to make me nervous. Here I'm getting a pep talk (I think it was a pep talk) from TK-16818 @GilesWoodward. I was so up in my head at that moment I can't say for sure what he said. I don't even remember anyone there with a camera. Then to make matters worse as I walked out he made a big announcement about First Troop coming out so there was some applause and other commotion which made me self-conscience, but then I remembered that no one was going to see the horror on my face and I calmly walked to the photo booth area for my shift. First hurdle achieved! The rest of the photos are from various times throughout the three days. I think that Jawa was making a move for my blaster! TK-55810 is the other trooper that lives 5 minutes from me. She helped a lot the last few months with pictures and information on what to expect at a troop. By day 2 I was a bit less nervous about it all and I got a tip that allowed me to fit both my head and my glasses into the bucket at the same time which gave me enough confidence to walk around the immediate area a bit and interact. I had some people asking for selfies and was able to deliver some lines and get some laughs. I did find my lower back would get sore unless I moved around every few minutes. Standing in one place for too long is murder for me. By day 3 I was itching to get into that armor! Never thought I'd be saying that. I did more interactions as I tried to develop my character and hiked around the entire dealer area with one of our Imperial officers. I probably did about 2 hours of trooping that day and could have easily done more, but had to get ready for the trip home. My back was getting used to the feel of the armor and movement and in general I didn't find anything too uncomfortable or too hot. I did take note of a couple little things that I will let wear in a bit before making fitting adjustments. At one point a television camera was stuck in our faces and they asked the three of us above to have a conversation so we did a little adlib as I questioned them about being the rebels I was looking for. If this link works we're at about the 2:30 mark. No dialog was left in and it's in French but you can get the intent very clearly. https://www.facebook.com/icisaskatchewan/videos/960924468269825/ TK-34575 in the sandtrooper and his son. @@wook1138was instrumental in getting me to this point as he patiently answered dozens of questions. This guy wanted a photo as he used the chainsaw on our TIE fighter so I suggest we react as best we could. We let people take as many photos as they needed. A kid asked us to sign his book so we all did, but now that I see the title I'm not sure if that was such a good idea! Maybe just as well I didn't use my real name... Some of my favorite/interesting things that happened. I played a statue for a few minutes and watched as some people were taking a close look at me. Then I talked and they laughed saying they didn't think I was real then they wanted photos with me. I was walking behind a father and his little boy when the father said to his son, "Look who's behind you." and he turned around and was all smiles when I fist bumped him. I liked saying, "Everyone say Star Trek" in the photo booth when people were wearing starfleet shirts and lines like, "You need to take that again I had my eyes closed." and "Everyone frown." which all got laughs. Faiirly standard lines from most I know. We had props for people to use in the booth and one was a blaster so if a little kid picked that and stood beside me I would bend over and show him my blaster and say, "Look it's the same as mine." which they all seemed to enjoy. I even had the chance to get people out of the way with, "Move along, move along." I learned quite a bit about other costumes as we didn't have dedicated handlers so we did that job for each other. Helping the mandos in and out of their costumes made me feel for them. So many layers they were boiling most of the time. We had a fan in the booth which helped a lot for everyone. I must admit that I was grinning a lot under that bucket. It was a surreal experience. I saw myself as someone in a plastic bucket seeing the world in shades of green and people looking back at me were smiling and seeing a stormtrooper. Even looking at photos of me I can't believe it is me under there! Saturday night we had a multi-club supper which was great to get to know everyone even more and another member gave me a little welcome package of patches, coins and stickers! I was feeling special and welcomed by the group. I think the Saskatchewan gang is going to have a lot of good times together and there was a lot of that buzz around the table. I came back with some con crud cold, but am ready to go out for number 2 on the 27th of this month. Then there seems to be steady slate of available troops if I want them (and likely I'll want them). Really hard to put into words all the feelings this past weekend. Many of you have described the same thing but until I felt it for myself I couldn't fully appreciate it. Thanks for looking! Bart ************************************** Number 1 is going to be going up by the end of this weekend. Is a troop considered one event or is each day of the event its own troop? I asked the other guys and no one knew and none of them have a log here. Bart

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?

Troop #39: May 7th, 2023—Kids Help Phone walk, London, ON Last one of a triple-troop weekend, a nice easy photo op at the gathering area before a charity walk for Kids Help Phone. The Jawa is my bride-to-be, Carisa! We're getting married next June. Those who troop together!

Troop #38: May 6th, 2023—Free Comic Book Day, London, ON The weather at this troop was absolutely ideal. Exactly the right temperature, a nice breeze, not a cloud in sight. Superb turn out. One of our handlers caught a photo I really like of me before the crowds showed up. And some other shots from the day. I'm generally the "thumb-up, gun-up" guy.

Troop #37: May 5th, 2023—Star Wars Day school visit, Sarnia, ON My first time trooping at a school! Very cool to interact with such a wide age range of kiddos. Would love to do it again sometime. The only photo we kept for ourselves was this one:

Troop #36: April 29th, 2023—CK Expo, Chatham, ON One of my favourite gigs of the year. A lovely, bite-sized convention. The only photo I got in my TK was from the Blast-a-Trooper range: Here I am again, this time in my Rebel Scum (Jedi) robes. And some other shots from the day. The members in our area have been making wonderful props, it's great to troop in front of these backdrops.

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.

Testing top secret technology for the spread of the Emperors ideology! Please welcome TK 69826 to the Stormtrooper Hall of Fame, April 2023! @TikiTechie Troop log can be found here. Well done trooper and congratulations! Keep it up and you'll have earned that badge! With Unquestioned Loyalty Jonatan Östling TK-23592 "Nairy" Curator Hall Of Fame