Carlos Flores, a 10th-grade student, created a replica of a helmet worn by the electronic music duo Daft Punk. The front of this silver chrome helmet has a full LED matrix display that illuminates words and patterns. To shape the helmet, Carlos used a baseball helmet and cardboard. He added fiberglass and Bondo to give it structural integrity, and he smoothed it down to paint it.
Inside, the electronics include an 8x32 LED matrix array with LED drivers. An MSP430 LaunchPad controls the sequence of LED patterns. Carlos got help from his dad, Luis, to cycle through a lot of patterns and words and figure out what looked best.
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I agree. It's amazing what kids are doing with electronics today. The MSP430 Launchpad is definitely a cool prototyping platform like the Arduino to build smart electronic gadgets. Awesome project!
That was a fun project! I'm sure he makes a big impression wearing that while on a DJ gig. It'd be fun to add some kind of voice-following algorithm to the display, so the visor looks like Kit, from the old Knight Rider TV show. Tack on a voice-altering chip and you could go totally robotic! That's the delight of projects like this -- it gets the imagination going.
Good to know that there are some other people that do this in high school. Really great project too, I like the use of auto body filler to cover the helmet, as well as the use of cheap and avaliable materials like carboard instead of something expensive like cnc cut or 3-d printed parts. Nice job!
Bondo was cool, Chuck. When I was young, I worked in an automaotive store that sold Bondo. A lot of lazy body guys would slap on tons of cheap Bondo rather than doing the more difficult work of pulling dents and smoothing the metal surface. That meant if you hit a good pot hole, whole chunks of Bondo would fall off your car.
This is the best written and most thoroughly analyzed project I've seen in this series. I'm comparing that to the college projects and the senior engineers that have presented on here! Great job! You'll be a major asset to some big corp someday, or blaze your own trail of success!
You will want to check out a blog I've been following for years. Starting as a 'simple' hobbiest, and now having graduated to making enough money building replica gadgets as a professional Prop creator; http://volpinprops.blogspot.com/2010/07/daft-punk-final.html
Tends to include complete parts, manufacturing methods, photos, and electronics information on nearly all of this projects, including his Daft Punk replica helmets (one is nearly identical to the original that this entry was emulating).
I agree with your analysis. Not only did the project look like fun to build, the creator seemed very bright and charming. I enjoy these things that are built just for the heck of it and the builder does not take him/herself too seriously.
Andrew Morris designed a circuit that could detect a stroke victim's groan and convert the sound into a signal so caregivers would know when help was needed.
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