Maker Simone Giertz creates a ridiculous, impractical, yet awesome motorized helmet that brushes her teeth. Sorta.

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This motorcycle helmet was heavily altered to accept all of the hardware that goes into driving that huge array of LEDs. [Brian Cardellini] built it to wear at burning man. He claims to have been in over his head with the project, but we certainly don’t get that feeling when we see the thing in action. It’s light on build details, but there are plenty of demo shots in the video after the break. The animation and fading action really gets started about a minute and a half into it.

One of the early frames of the video is a shot of the parts order webpage. Since it’s an HD clip we were able to glean a few bits and pieces from that. It includes a MAX7219 LED Display Driver and fifteen 25-packs of Blue LEDs. Now that chip is a great choice, and one of the later shots shows two of them on breakout board driven by an Arduino. The look is very clean since he carved out most of the helmet’s padding to make room for the electronics.

[via Adafruit]

Filed under: led hacks, wearable hacks

I've been busy lately tinkering on and off and thought readers might be interested in what I've been working on.

I spent a few nights of spare time last week rebuilding my bluetooth ski helmet, which is now working perfectly with a new main board. It's a glove- and snow-friendly conversion of a Motorola S305, retaining nothing but the main PCB, with the earphones and mic broken out to 3.5mm jacks, all buttons broken out to .1" pin headers, a much bigger battery, and an Adafruit USB LiIon/LiPoly charger. I'll post a few pictures soon, and it will get a full shakedown this weekend at Alpine and/or Squaw.

I backed the Printrbot project on Kickstarter a few months ago and received the printed parts in the mail recently, so I've got the 3D printing bug. After raising over 33x of the target funding, its creator Brook Drumm is understandably busy getting promised kits out to other backers. That leaves a lot for me to get together, mainly the hardware, electronics, and hot end, but without an official BOM I'm picking through lots of incomplete lists and RepRap parts wikis. The mechanical design being so much simpler than a Prusa Mendel is what got me interested, and I'm happy working on it when time allows over the next few months. It could be Arduino-driven but that's still up in the air; Sanguinololu electronics are included in the complete kit, so I have a few Pololu A4988 stepper driver boards on the way to play around with.

I did use an Arduino (actually a Boarduino) a few weeks ago to build something for work, but as cool as it is, I can't discuss it here except to say that it's camera-related... of course :)