2014 - Daft Punk Thomas Helmet

This helmet was built entirely from scratch starting from paper templates and protoboard for the actual circuitry.

Before starting anything I had a general idea of what I was aiming for. Some extra features I had wanted to add were speakers in the ears and strobe lights. I ended up ditching the strobe lights in the end. Tons of research on the LED matrix design and drew out a schematic.

Same as the Iron Man build the year before, I started out with a paper template and glued all the pieces together once again using the Pepakura Designer software.

Still new to building in general with little money, I used cheese cloth and an adhesive to provide a little stronger foundation. I ended up spackle on the outside instead of Bondo filler because it was much easier to sand. I did not realize how heavy it was going to be...

The spackle was extremely flakey so I went back to my smelly old friend fiberglass resin and coated the inside and outside of the helmet with the stuff. **Remember to apply outdoors and wear proper ventilation!

I know it looks lopsided as hell. It still bothers me to this day but we were learning! Bought some random desk speakers online that appear to fit in the ear sockets. Now its time for the electronics!

To hold the LED matrix I handmade a frame out of 1/8" thick plastic. Each matrix is an 8x8 and there were 4 of them so 256 LEDs total. To hold the LEDs I had to painfully align and drill 512 holes in the frame, 2 for each LED. Nothing like monotony lol

Now that we have our 256 LEDs in place we had to create our board to control each 8x8 matrix. Remember there are 4 of them. I did not know how to use software to design the board but I had the components and knew how everything went together. SO MUCH SOLDERING.

Side note: I do not recommend soldering directly to components as too much heat may cause your components to fail. For the love of all things please use sockets. If you don't know what that is here you go. So much easier to swap parts if there's an issue!

 Matrix board test! Everything was rotated by 90 degrees so I had some rewiring to do. 

Completed soldering the 4 matrix boards and did a full test. you can see random flickering but I was super excited that I was getting somewhere. Edited out the audio because copyright 😂

 

Now that we got the circuitry all set the easy part was putting everything together. Holes for the speakers were cut out and glued into place. I did not have access to chrome paint at the time so I just went with a glossy black finish.

ideo but it is taking forever to render. I'll figure it out. This project in particular holds a special place in my heart and made me realize how much I love learning about electronic design.

The end!

List of improvements:

- Better overall helmet design

- Learn board design (managed to grab top tier software when I was in school lol) - Brush up on C#/Arduino for additional features

- Use diffused LEDs not bright ones. I practically blinded myself from the inside.

FINAL VIDEO! :D 

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