[Garrett] over at MaceTech was approached by a friend who needed a light-up mohawk installed on a Viking helmet, and he needed it ASAP.
Now, [Garrett] does tons of work with LEDs but it’s not every day you are asked to construct a sound-responsive LED mohawk. He had all sorts of LEDs and other bits on hand, but finding the fiber optics that would make up the mohawk itself took a bit of time.
After a bit of searching, he located some cheap bulk fiber optic toy wands, and got busy cutting them apart to remove the fiber bundles. The fibers were glued into a laser cut plastic assembly, where they were paired with a handful of OctoBrite CYANEA modules [Garrett] had on hand. He bought a handful of components from SparkFun, including an Arduino Pro Mini to control the device, as well as an electret mic and graphic equalizer chip to handle the audio input/filtering.
He wrapped up the code portion of the mohawk and handed it off to his friend, who says that the “helmet is +99 to epic awesomeness”, which sounds like a ringing endorsement to us.
[via BuildLounge]
Check out the video below to see the fiber optic mohawk helmet in action.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mVQJ-gWGpc&w=470]
Wow. Very impressive. About half way through the first part of the video, I was beginning to think it was lame, then the VU meter and spectrum analyzer functions came on and I realized I had underestimated this project by an order of magnitude. Well done!
I can honestly say I had the exact same reaction. Love it
See, now I want to make one of these for my motorcycle helmet, but make it respond to the tachometer or speedometer! Very cool project
@Nick: So you can say “look at me I’m speeeeeeding”
WOW!! He now has a ‘Viking’ helmet, (A Faux-Viking helmet, since they didn’t use horns on their helmets. (It would make going through any kind of tangle-wood type area (such as hedgerow) impossible and dangerous)) That NOW has ‘head lights’…
Something they might only have, if they had their head on fire, and at that point would not wear the helmet…
Imagine, being in battle, with a bright light on your head!!!
We called it ‘Target Practice’
Yeah, I think realism was totally what he was going for.
THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM!
No such luck, Marvin.
The perfect headgear for !
Oops, botched the xhtml, sorry. Should say Techno Viking!
Viking? Looks Roman to me. Tis’ be a sweet helmet nontheless.
This is absolutely awesome!
The effects are stunning, I’d love for him to release the code.
This would make an awesome gay pride helmet.
not a viking helmet. Viking never wore helmets with horns.
It’s Basic history people.
Fuck history, I LOVE THIS HELMET!
It’s actually a Greek Hoplite Helmet, not a viking helmet. And I don’t think the Greeks had horns on them either. Basic History again people :P
@meatman: Enough people believe they did, that the Mexicans made this “Viking” helmet and slapped some real cow horns on it. By the way, cow horns are really tough to hollow out, and smell absolutely evil when attacked with a hot Forstner bit. In the middle of all that I somehow lost my urge to maintain historic accuracy…the Vikings also didn’t have LED mohawks.
So true that it hurts ;)
“I NEED IT ASAP!!” … Someone’s on their way to BurningMan?
That’s what I figured; I can’t think of any other reason that someone would NEED something like this in any timeframe unless they were on a kids TV show or something.
If they ever do a remake of Running Man based on the original movie, not the short story, this would be great headgear for Dynamo!
Oh hell yeah. Even for it’s time, his armor was covered in LEDs. Musta been a bitch to design/etch/solder all those blinking LEDs.
WIN!!!
Can I buy one please? Seriously.
How could I make one of these?
Are there any instructions elsewhere on the Internet? I think one of these belongs on my motorcycle helmet.
I clicked the buildlounge.com link, but their server is down.
how much would you sell one for these for ?
I was totally wowed by this that I took the inspiration and began building my own https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNP7PbcQaR8 . Very cool creation!
I need a mohawk like this for my comicon capt marvel costume! How much??