DPHP 1 - The Beginnings

I've decided that I'm going to part and parcel up the posts related to the Daft Punk Helmet Project, at least until the point where I'm up to date with current events.  So allow me to start with the project at it's earliest inception.

The start date for the maelstrom of ideas that would evolve and become DPHP was mid October, 2006.  I was talking with an old friend from high school about Daft Punk, a musical duo I had 'gotten back into' after discovering the full Interstella 5555 movie (and not just the handful of music videos) and the fairly recent release of their Human After All album.  I had managed to get my friend interested enough to watch Interstella 5555 (house/electronica really wasn't his scene so the music was lost on him).  After having scene the film, the conversation when something like this:

Friend: Dude! you should totally go as one of the guy from that movie for Halloween!
Me: You'll need to be more specific, there were bunches of people in the movie, all of them cartoons technically.
Friend: The robot guys you were talking about! Daft Junk or whatever.  You should totally put all those lights in it and stuff!  That would be sweet!
Me: Um, A) Halloween is like 10 days way, B) that requires a bunch of tools I don' have access to, and C) I'm aerospace, not electrical engineering.  I'd have no idea where to start with the electronics.
Friend: But you go to [leading engineering university].

Those last four words would be my undoing, so to speak.  With that I took up the mantle, the challenge of building a replica Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.  But it wasn't to be just any replica.  I had to improve upon every aspect of the original design.  You'll slowly find out about all that as we go along.

So with the gauntlet thrown down, I decided to begin with generating a solid CAD model of the helmet.  I knew that I wouldn't be making the helmet any time soon, but I liked the project simply as a technical exercise.  I'd spent the previous summer CAD'ing up my own version of the Vic Viper ship from the Gradius series of games.  I learned a lot in that process, and figured the Guy-Man helmet would be a nice new project.

So, who wants pretty pictures?  Thought so.



This is the very first model I ever made of the helmet, Round 1, in stunning technicolor.  Eh, maybe not the last bit.  Looking back it was an extremely rough model based on some even worse references.  I used two screen grabs from the 'Grammys' sequence of Interstella 5555.  Needless to say they had all kinda of issues, including simulated lens distortion.  It gets better trust me.



Along with that design I had the 'rather outdated' control system in the form of arm mounted control panels.  Needless to say not the easiest things to operate in armored gloves and a helmet full of lights.  Still, not bad looking if I do say so myself.





The second generation of the helmet, known as Amped.  I had learned a lot from the first one, and started replacing a massive number of the features that made up the helmet.  I sloped in the sides for a more organic look.  The chin angled down more and it's bottom curled under, again, making it more organic and lifelike.  This is where it started to look like something 'Human After All.'



When stuff started getting really complicated, aka Amplified.  Largely based off of the previous Amped generation, though again with some of the features improved in an almost indistinguishable way.  What I really spent my effort on was making it practical and manufacture-able.  I included the 'sub-visor' which would hold all of the main display LEDs, the side bars, auxiliary LEDs, so on and so forth.  If you look really carefully, you'll even see the 'swing arms' from a dead design decision.  In the interest of ventilation and ease of wear-ability, I thought it would be a nice feature to have the visor hinge open.  Needless to say it was a complicated concept and died very quickly along the way.



And this is very close to what we're working with right now, almost.  This is far more attractive design, isn't it?  Angular, sweeping, contoured, organic, and whatever industrial design buzz words you want to use.  Needless to say it's damn close to the real thing, but with my own twist and opinion on the design.  I guess this is as good a place to stop as any.  We'll get to all the colored bits you see in due time, I promise.