daft punk helmet. LED's on a curving cardboard.

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Frequently-Asked Questions
1

hi everyone,
i am new to this forum, and it seems i will be coming here alot from now on cz i just bought arduino duemilanove ATMEGA328.

i bought this after seeing this guy making a daft punk helmet led's with arduino:

it is amazing, and i would like to know what steps i need to take to build one myself.

this is what i bought from adafruit.com:
Adafruit Metro 328 Starter Pack : ID 68 : $44.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

i've been following a tutorial on ladyada.net and at this page, it tells me to solder some things together before starting:
http://www.ladyada.net/make/pshield/index.html

should i be doing this?
can you recommend a tutorial site?

let's say that i want to make one exactly like the one in the video.
towards the end of the video, he is making something different from the led's. what is that? and it looks like i would need that too

2

well sure you could do that. You need to solder it if you plan on using it :stuck_out_tongue:

Making the daft punk helmet is going to be an interesting project. If you plan on individually control each LED (which it looks like he is doing), you are going to need to learn about multiplexing. Search around the forums for multiplexing LEDs. There are a bunch of ways to do this, thought if you want to control 80 LEDs like he is doing, you are probably going to need LED drivers like the MAX 7221

Also you are going to need to solder the LEDs into a matrix form. There are many tutorials on this as well. Alternatively, you could buy a few pre built LED matrixes from a company like sparkfun.

This should start you off, good luck