A New Jawa Mask

Jawa scientists have labored for years in Jawa Labs to bring you a high-end jawa mask with all the best features, including adjustable fit, LED eyes, fans, USB power, an integrated sound system, radio-linked in-glove controls and the ability to "blink". These pages contain detailed plans for that mask, including a parts list with links to where to buy them, a detailed build guide, troubleshooting notes and a description of possible variations. Great Jawa Horde members in the Atlanta area used these plans to build ourselves a pile of masks before DragonCon 2022. Building each mask required approximately $100 in parts and we believe the design is mature enough to share with Jawas and Jawanabees everywhere. There's a design overview below, with details on the pages linked in the navigation bar. But first, some caveats:

Building these masks requires a fair bit of time, non-trivial electronics skills, and basic Cosplay crafting ability.
For several reasons, building a single mask from these plans costs more per mask than building several, so think about a build with friends.
The Horde is providing plans, not offering these on commission. From what we've seen so far, we believe that there may be broad interest in masks like these and if you or your organization wants to build them on commission, we support and encourage that.

Mask Overview

Key Parts: One of the first things to sort out was what to use as an underlying basis for the mask. The plastic "hockey" mask we used in the Horde's original build had the advantage that it was cheap, but the tiny elastic supports tended to slip off the top of the head, ride on the ears, stretch out with time, etc. Not something you wanted to wear for a long time. For the next-gen mask we've chosen a plastic softball mask as a basis (see right).

These are comfortable, adjustable, have room for glasses, and should stay solidly in place for long troops. However, they're pricey, so almost half of our build cost goes to the mask.

The Horde has been pretty happy with the fans, eyes, switch and back-suspended USB battery setup from our original build, so that remain largely the same in the new mask.

The most significant addition (and build complication) is the sound system electronics. We've settled on a solution based on the Adafruit FX mini soundboard, paired with a tiny 3 watt 5 volt amplifier and a 3 watt speaker. These are controlled by a 433Mhz 4 channel receiver and a custom inverter board to make the receiver talk to the soundboard properly. A pic of a messy prototype for this is at right.

In the actual build, the speaker is installed roughly where your mouth would be in the mask, below the jawa eyes, and the electronics will sit inside the mask behind the eyes. Everything is powered off the same 5V USB battery that runs your eyes and fans.

For the "control glove", we have the matching 433Mhz 4 channel transmitter and 4 tactile switches, powered by a standard cr2032 3V coin-cell battery as shown at right.

The control glove build describes only the electronics because every jawa might want their switches arranged differently (right hand vs. left hand, in the palm vs more out on the fingers, etc.), so you can select your own glove and sew the buttons where you want them. We've had good luck with things that show up when you search for "fingerless compression gloves". Just wear a looser-fitting glove over them.

Operation: The system has four buttons and a four channel remote control. In the default setup the first three buttons are sound, with button 1 generating "Utinni", button 2 generating one of 10 random jawa noises, and button 3 generating the Jawa laugh/scream ("Eeeeeeee"). Button 4 is "blink". That is, it turns your eyes off for as long as it's pressed, which is kind of a fun and unexpected effect when you're interacting with people.

Enjoy your Jawa! Utinni!

Sincerely,
The Great Jawa Horde

If find problems in this documentation, or have improvements to suggest, we can be reached at: greatjawahorde@gmail.com

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Next Generation Jawa Mask

A New Jawa Mask

Mask Overview