Awesome Fiber Optic LED Viking Helmet

octobrite_led_mohawk_helmet

[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]

28 thoughts on “Awesome Fiber Optic LED Viking Helmet

  1. 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!

  2. 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’

  3. @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.

  4. 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.

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