Daft Punk Guy-Manuel Helmet Build - Excessive LEDs and 3D Printing

Time to get Beetlejuice round with all his head shrinking powers!

Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice!

Jackscoby said:

That stinks that it might not fit! (that's all i can really understand lol.

... Soo, what ya gonna do with the helmet that doesnt fit after you (hopefully) make a new one? Haha

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Haven't decided yet. There are the obvious solutions: hang it on the wall, sell on ebay/etc, retask for some other project, so on and so forth.

freedomoffunk said:

Time to get Beetlejuice round with all his head shrinking powers!

Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice!

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That would depend...

Assuming density is constant during the shrinking:
A) your skull would become so brittle it would crush under it's own weight
B) your brain would have so few cells in it you would cease to function

I much prefer the Farscape pocket quantum universe whereby density does not need to be constant :behave

"Prototype WS2811/WS2812 LEDS - MONEY
I mentioned that I'm looking at these. Basically, these are the driver chip (WS2811) and integrated package (WS2812, 5050 LED sized) variants commonly used in LED strips/strands. This is currently my favorite for replacing the rainbowduino in the next generation of display LEDs. Many, many advantages include:
>reduced weight (less complex sub-visor, fewer wires, lighter LEDs, no rainbow boards, etc).
>'simple' wiring (power, ground, and 'daisy chain' of data in/out)
>greater brightness control (calibration correction, more colors, etc)
>'better' brightness/power efficiency (I'll need to know true brightness to really compare, but basic test math says better so far)
Challenges are:
>'dead bug' soldering (not all that different from what I had to do for last display)
>'biblical' power consumption at full brightness (0.06A per led, 5V power, 384 LEDs, 23+ amps, ~120W, I might software limit the max brightness to 1/4 or less)
>finicky control (other people are making libraries for high speed, 32bit controllers like the Teensy 3 and Arduino Due)
I need to buy some to play around with, and to quantify some of the other peripheral changes (higher view angles, brightness consistency, etc) before going whole hog. And even the test hardware will cost money as above."

I too will experiment with this route for my client's project. Sounds fascinating, and lots of support out there for existing Arduinos. Bought myself a Mega 2560 and a short strip of these RGB LED modules.

Going to try this guy's code, he seems happy and lots of google searching proves it should work:
http://funkboxing.com/wordpress/?p=1366

As for your helmet, wow sorry it won't fit. You could sell it as is with the working LEDs for an astronomical sum on ebay, since I doubt you want to undolder all that crazy stuff you did before.

Thanks for keeping ahead of the technology. And congrats on your magical smoke adventure, no good hobbyist should be without one under his/her belt (I fried a diode this weekend, that was exciting).

As for your troubles with baud rate on your I2C: well, I2C is pretty sucky as an interface, its a 2 wire serial that is very prone to noise. And is pretty slow by design. 400K is pretty zippy for I2C, so it makes sense to me 100K worked better for you. For my experiments, I'm going SPI, it can at least run in the MHZ range without much trouble.

colonelmasako said:

I too will experiment with this route for my client's project. Sounds fascinating, and lots of support out there for existing Arduinos. Bought myself a Mega 2560 and a short strip of these RGB LED modules.

Going to try this guy's code, he seems happy and lots of google searching proves it should work:
FastSPI LED Effects » funkboxing

As for your helmet, wow sorry it won't fit. You could sell it as is with the working LEDs for an astronomical sum on ebay, since I doubt you want to undolder all that crazy stuff you did before.

Thanks for keeping ahead of the technology. And congrats on your magical smoke adventure, no good hobbyist should be without one under his/her belt (I fried a diode this weekend, that was exciting).

As for your troubles with baud rate on your I2C: well, I2C is pretty sucky as an interface, its a 2 wire serial that is very prone to noise. And is pretty slow by design. 400K is pretty zippy for I2C, so it makes sense to me 100K worked better for you. For my experiments, I'm going SPI, it can at least run in the MHZ range without much trouble.

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I recommend You have a look at Paul's work here. It was featured on HackADay yesterday and that's the 'high speed library' I was referring to. He's using Direct Memory Access (DMA) for basically no processor load required to drive the display. I have yet to dig into it yet to see how I could mod it for my use.

The I2C debugging problems seem to have been less about the signal noise than porting problems from 8bit to 32bit. I've since tested it with 'suitably long' wires to double check that problem and noise wasn't the issue (when everything was working). 100K was just too damn slow because you could actually see each rainbow getting its update in a sort of 'wipe' from top left to bottom right. It wasn't huge, but going 400K cleaned it up instantly.

This is far from the most interesting 'smoke' adventure, and actually not the most expensive either (I use to work with 1-12KW motors for a living). But it was still an annoying mistake that I haven't made in the hundreds or thousands of times I power cycled the display before.

I've got a head scan calculating now, will see the results soon.

How's it going?

I was thinking, when you resize it, maybe you should square off the chin on the helmet to make it more accurate

Jackscoby said:

How's it going?

I was thinking, when you resize it, maybe you should square off the chin on the helmet to make it more accurate

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Specifically, the square chin is often attributed to the TRON Legacy rendition of the helmets. My CAD predates that so does not include it and hasn't been 'grossly modified' in probably 2 years. And now I will segue into something related.

So this brings up a long standing 'thing' for me. I's not good or bad, it's just my opinion.

Some might be aware of the RabidIrish group buy over at The Daft Club from... some long time ago. I did the CAD for the Thomas helmet that was going to be used for the master mold. It turned into bad timing for me and Rabid and the Volpin bucket buys I think canabalized the pre-reg list Rabid had worked up. I'm pretty sure that ship has sailed.

So I posted pictures of my work as I went to the thread to show people what they were buying. And there was a never ending list of corrections and improvement requests that resulted. It wasn't much fun.

One of the critical problems with the DP helmets is that there is an unknown number of versions and revisions to these helmets. I know there was a thread about it over at TDC. And everyone is different, sometimes in overt was and sometimes it's subtle, and sometimes it's just repairs that were made.

Adam Savage once mentioned something about this (tangentially) in the 'purpose' of the RPF subculture. Even though we're effectively all here to copy someone else's work (namely movie special effects and the like), we still take tremendous pride and ownership in the work that we do and we make it our own.

So in that regard my buckets are an amalgam of the various designs, what I can actually glean from reference photos, my person style and sensibility, and the realities of all the electronics I want to cram in there. They are my Blade Runner pistol and my Maltese Falcon (more Adam references). Honestly, no one will give a hoot about the accuracy once the LEDs fire up. I don't say that spitefully, I really don't, I say it factually, because the whole point of this project is the absolute epic-ness of the 10's of watts of RGB LEDS shoved in a wearable, portable marque on my face.

I truely believe there is no difference between the TRON prom dress and the most accurately reproduced CLU outfit or the .Netduino TRON disk. All are ways in which people take ownership of a fantastic project based on ideas and visuals from the world. Painters do the same thing.

So apologies for soap-boxing a bit, but given my slow progress due to money constraints right now, I like to provide something, and in this case it's an inside look at my brain and how it treats this project. In rescaling the helmet and working with new electronics I may very well take another look at the design and include some TRON elements or other such modifications, but that's as my preference decides. I have some TRON era reference images stashed (I only hoard digitally, the physical world takes up too much space) but haven't taken a critical eye to them.

End tangent.

An Aside: if you don't follow Tested.com, do it just for the weekly Adam podcast. It's fantastic, and at times I like to think I'm the magically created forgot son of Adam and Jamie. Don't ask for details.

Well, yes
But every era has the square chin, not just the tron. Which im sure you know

Hey! Haven't checked in in a while. How's it going?

Jackscoby said:

Hey! Haven't checked in in a while. How's it going?

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Almost no progress unfortunately. I have to focus on 'me' right now, ie the new job mostly. I'm back in research mode, considering more and more that I'm going to move to embedded linux for the main processor. This implies a new language (or relearning C++ with a focus on object oriented coding).

This is a very Impressive Project. Kudos Sir!

Narrator said:

This is a very Impressive Project. Kudos Sir!

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Thank you sir. It's not completely dead yet (cue Monty Python) but it's requiring some serious morphing in order to keep up with the times. I think I'm reaching an inflection point with hardware availability. Raspberry Pi 2, Intel Compute Stick, and the inventions that are being spawned from that concept. It was just announced that Processing (my language of choice at the moment) has been 'ported' to the Raspi 2 and I'm chomping at the bit to give it a shot.

So hopefully this is a 'stay tuned' and not a 'Firefly's Cancelled' kind of moment.