Daft Punk Helmet Build

#Practical#Electrical

A convergence of digital and physical, building TB3

For a long time after discovering Daft Punk, I knew I wanted a helmet just like Thomas Bangalter. The mystery of the mask, the chrome contrasting with the dark visor of the later generation helmets — incredibly fascinating. Not to mention the original Discovery-era helmets with visual displays made up of LEDs.

I’d started creating a helmet early in 2013 using Pepakura, after doing other small prop builds. This initial build warped beyond use. So, when I got the chance for a tertiary project to show a culmination of my studies (3D and physical modelling), of course I decided to model one of the most accurate Daft Punk helmets that I could, transfer to pepakura and then build it. Working with my tutor Gareth, an ex-Weta Workshop Supervisor, I got this project up and running.

The tools were simple. I spent a bit of time trialling glues to assemble the final paper pieces, settling on Selley’s PVA Wood Glue. An exacto knife and a steel rule were used for the precision cutting needed.

From paper to prop

This project was printed on ~240 GSM A2 card, and totalled over 16 A3 pages. Each piece is individually cut-out and each matching side glued together; much like a complex geometric net we used to make in Maths class. Eventually, each piece and seam forms corners, curves, and cutouts, until your on-screen 3D model exists in real life.

With the help of friends and daft club forum members (brunoosti, slinkytrips, Volpin Props, TK9336), the visor started to take shape, along with a visualisation of what the eventual LED display would look like! One of only three known prop-accurate builds — featuring a 42x11 LED matrix, readouts, and accurate helmet geometry.

Once assembled, and thankful that the model was scaled correctly to my own head, the next step was to 3D print the multiple variations of ears, and start the next stage on the helmet. Unfortunately, I’d made two mistakes:

The walls of my ear puck prints had been extruded outwards on the model, not inwards — so they didn’t fit inside my helmet ear-puck recesses!
I’d started working with builders bog, instead of what I would eventually use (car filler). This left me with a horrible, clunky, over-creamed butter kind of surface.

I somehow managed to sand it back to a workable, cracked cement surface which I’d cover and sand back… After the long process of sanding, applying bondo, sanding, bondo, again and again, I got to a stage where I felt comfortable applying spray putty and wet-sanding back to a smooth finish. From there: priming, dust-coating, and more wet-sanding, until I’d achieved an almost finished helmet master “sculpt”, ready to be molded and cast out of temperature-resistant resin for chroming.

Wired up

All designed and assembled by yours truly. This has been the most costly part of the build — after reaching a total I will not divulge (it’s high…), I stopped tallying costs. The tally: 570+ LEDs, multiple PCBs (printed circuit boards) and a whole lot of man hours.

The electronics went through a few iterations. I originally designed the motherboard around an ATmega32A PU, driving 12 MAX7219-equipped PCBs. Alongside those, 2 sideboard PCBs (each with 2 VU meters and 4 bi-colour LEDs) and 2 rainbow chaser boards round out the setup.

This eventually evolved to an Arduino pushing shift register expander modules to run the matrix, visor and ear chaser LEDs — a solution reached after some lengthy back-and-forth with a fellow Kiwi Daft Punker making his own build. Thanks, slinky!

These laser-cut files — from my friend Bruno’s designs — make up the “sub-visor”, the LED frame that sits inside the visor.

Based on the same idea as perforated one-way window signage, the gaps between LEDs give great outward visibility. When viewed from inside a dark helmet, the effect is the same as looking through mirror tint - you can see out, but no one can see in.

The 460+ red 2mm LEDs were placed, bent, cut and soldered into a single line of 11 LEDs. This process was repeated for each of the 42 columns, then wired together to form the final grid of the matrix.

The remaining white, square and bi-coloured LEDs were wired onto the custom PCBs I designed, and like the matrix, connected to the drivers and main brain.

I’ve also since created my own generator for both my LED matrix, as well as a Guy-man helmet matrix. This allows the user to create static patterns, animations and insert custom code, which then gets written for multiple code outputs. You can check this LED Generator project out below!