Daft Punk helmet Arduino controller code
Now and then it’s nice to step away from web development and work on a project in meatspace. Last year I was lucky enough to help the super talented Harrison Krix program the lights for his Guy Manuel Daft Punk helmet. He was midway through the project and had the electronics nailed down but programming the Arduino board wasn’t his speciality so he got in contact with me after seeing my Guy Man helmet in action. I updated my original code (which used a Rainbowduino) to use Harrison’s Arduino setup, here it is in action:
Much better than my helmet for sure. I’ve had a few emails recently asking for the source code for this. I’ve chatted with Harrison and he’s happy to make it public so here it is:
DOWNLOAD (Note: requires Arduino Potentiometer library which can be found here)[][]
It’s released under an MIT license so feel free to do what you want with it but make sure you include the license and original attribution if you do decide to re-distribute it.
Unfortunately I don’t have the time to write up a big tutorial on how to use it at the moment or exactly how it works, however the code is fairly well commented so unless you’re a complete newbie you should be able to understand what’s going on. I’ll try to answer any questions if you leave them in the comments. I’d also like to state I’m by no means an Arduino expert so there may be better or faster ways of doing things in the code which I’m not aware of, but it all works. The electronics are detailed over on [Harrison’s blog][] if you’re not already familiar with them.
[]: /src/Guy_Manual_Helmet_LED.zip [Harrison’s blog]: http://volpinprops.blogspot.com/2010/07/daft-punk-final.html