Marc made this cool DIY Daft Punk helmet and wrote a post on his blog detailing its assembly:
It wasn’t until June of 2014 when I was browsing through Sparkfun’s New Product Post and I saw some LEDs that caught my eye. Now, I know the WS2811/2812 LEDs have been the craze for the past few years, but I have been out of the loop for a while. For my last LED project (Mau5head 2.0 for Deadmau5) completed in 2012, I designed custom flexible PCB strips that held 5mm SMD LEDs at a 10mm pitch. Each pixel had its own LPD-6803 controller IC, which I had to order custom from China in a QFN-16 package to get it small enough. It was a 6-month long project. Maybe some day I will write up a post about it.
These days, WS2811 LEDs have built-in controllers and apparently come in all shapes and sizes. When I saw the 5mm thru-hole LEDs on Sparkfun, I immediately thought about the Thomas helmet. This was the missing link I needed to make a really awesome display for Thomas. I called Shaggy and told him to get sanding. With the goal of bringing it to DragonCon 2014, we had to hurry.
Check out the video after the break.