DIY LED Helmet

Sorry for the lack of audio. This is an LED helmet a la Daft Punk I created for my wife's holiday music concert.

I vacuum formed (see my other video) a curved plastic form to hold the 160 ultrabright white LEDs which I hand soldered into a matrix of 5 rows by 32 columns.

For the logic, I used an ATTiny85 microcontroller outputting to 5 serial-in-parallel-out 8bit shift registers, 4 to control which columns are active and the last tied to a Darlington array IC to control the column. The shift register output pins are current limited to 20mA, so I didn't need resistors.

The AVR uses a phrase array referencing a character array to determine what LEDs are active for a current row, then outputs the information to the shift register, lighting up one row, then calculates the next row, etc, etc. The entire process takes milliseconds, so you can't see any flicker. I also use the internal AVR timers for timing the transitions.

More images available at http://irritablegourmet.imgur.com/led_helmet

And yes, you can (sort of) see out.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• daft
• punk
• helmet
• led
• DIY
• geek
• electronics

[9999AWC]

Could I buy one from you plz?