How to 3D-print your own Daft Punk helmet

Over a year ago, I linked out to a Wall Street Journal piece about people who built perfect replicas of the helmets worn by Daft Punk and sold them for thousands of dollars. I included a video called “How to make a Daft Punk helmet in 17 months.” It was an awesome project that was way, way out of my league. But it turns out that with spray paint, LEDs, and a 3D printer, you can make a functional and surprisingly convincing version of one of the designs.

Adafruit has a step-by-step guide to making the helmet, which of course it also sells parts for, but the basic process is shown above: you download the design file, resize the helmet to fit your head, and print it out using tinted transparent plastic, a process that took Adafruit three days and over a pound of filament to complete. Then you cover the face plate with tape and spray the rest with metallic paint. Then attach strips of LEDs to micro-controllers that you can program with light patterns, slide them inside, and become a robot.

Making the helmet requires some tinkering and special equipment — you’ll need to be able to solder wires, and the helmet above is supposed to be about 9 inches long and wide and 10 inches high, which is significantly bigger than many hobbyist 3D printers can manage. But getting access to a large printer is a lot easier (and cheaper) than figuring out how to cast plastic or shape metal and glass. And the ridges that layer-by-layer printing leaves give the helmet a distinctive, solid-looking texture. This is what 3D printing was made for.