Eh? You can definitely push resistors way harder than a regulator; the regulator will just go into thermal shutdown/foldback, and the resistor can take higher temperatures before it destroys itself. And you can actually buy cheap resistors that, without any heatsink and within their specs can safely dissipate 10W, while a typical TO-220 regulator is good for maybe 1.5W before a heatsink is required.
I was just observing that the TO package might be better in this case because you can put thermal conductive grease and bolt it to an arbitrarily large heatsink and dissipate the same amount of power at a lower temperature, and keep the costume from melting or catching fire. Generally regulator is just fancy zener diode…
I think you made a good point about other electronics on the costume. It might even be worth adding a microcontroller like a pic12f629 with internal oscillator. But then of course you’d need an ICSP to program it. Dont know if the space has one …
I think the space might have one kicking around, or I’d be happy to loan
whoever my PicKit 3
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