Roman Headgear Looks Less Silly With Lots Of Blinky

centurion-project

Look, it’s not Steam-Punk because the period is way out of whack. And we’ve never seen ourselves as “that guy” at the party. But it would be pretty hard to develop The Centurion Project and not take the thing to every festive gathering you could possibly attend. This sound-reactive helm compels party-going in a toga-nouveau sort of way.

[Roman] tells us that it started as a movie prop. The first build step was to remove the plume from the top of it. The replacement — seven meters worth of addressable RGB LEDS — looks just enough like an epic mohawk to elicit visions of the punk rock show, with the reactive patterns to make it Daft. The unexpected comes with the FFT generated audio visualizations. They’re grounded on the top side of each of the LED strips. Most would call that upside-down but it ends up being the defining factor in this build. Seriously, watch the demo after the break and just try to make your case that this would have been better the other way around.

As a final note, this project was written using Cinder. It’s an Open Source C++ library that we don’t remember hearing about before.

17 thoughts on “Roman Headgear Looks Less Silly With Lots Of Blinky

  1. Super nifty lighted hat…

    But, no, it does not look just enough like an epic mohawk… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohawk_people#Traditional_Mohawk_dress

    Damn Hollywood. Calling a Pawnee hairstyle a “Mohawk” is a meme that’s persisted since the 1939 movie “Drums along the Mohawk”.

    And stop calling tartan patterns “plaid”. A plaid is a cloth made with a tartan pattern wrapped around the waist and cast over the shoulder and fastened at the front. The literal Gaelic meaning is “blanket”. Plaid blanket is as redundant as ATM Machine or PIN Number.

    Still a nifty lighted hat, a Jaegermonster would kill for it. :)

        1. Table pad is instigation? It’s rubberized Elwood harmonius parfait. Under Eppelsteins curvacious tape dispensing nipple. Has are upstanding? Glorious!

  2. I got all excited for a second, thinking that this Cinder library might contain some useful functionality for embedded applications.

    Shame; I see that it’s what’s doing the audio processing on OSX, before passing data to an Arduino DUE, which then drives the LEDs (the helmet must be tethered to a host computer at the moment).

    I’m a little dubious of the claim that it requires a Cortex M3 to drive that many WS2812’s, especially with no processor overhead required for the audio analysis, but I can appreciate that he might be planning to move the analysis to the Due at a later date, so fair play.

    Certainly beats my old festival hat; I have been inspired to start work on a Mk2 for this season!

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