- Member DIN
- S770
I finished the wiring diagrams for my helmet electronics! The amplifier board was from MoeSizzlac 's tutorial here
Parzival
Member
Oh I love me a simple and straightforward wiring diagram. Awesome work!
- Member DIN
- S770
Okay so this is going to be a HUGE update!!! I apologize in advance for how much I am going to post here, and I'll break it down in a few posts for organization sake.
First things first the, the neck guard!
Let's start with a word of affirmation, Failure is always an option, and bot did I fail! My initial plan for the neck guard was to mold and cast it. However, the first time I molded it, I got a lot of things wrong, and the mold had a lot of holes, and problems with the interior texture. So, with that, I tried something crazy. I mixed up a batch of silicone, poured it in the existing mold, and shoved the positive back in there, to try to fill in the gaps.
To my credit, this actually surprisingly worked, despite being one of the biggest messes I've made in the shop. However, next was the cast, and I had the completely wrong kind of polyurethane! Apparently the one I had was for like casting fake bricks or really porous looking stones.
All this to say, after this catastrophic failure of it crumbling as I pulled it out, DeltaAlphaZulu gave me a great piece of advice, why don't I just print it out of TPU? Well, I decided to give it a shot, fixed up my printers, and started printing it. The print came out with a really nice finish, so now it was time to sand it.
I used 120 grit sandpaper, but next time I would probably go a Little lower grit. TPU is notoriously hard to sand. Once I got it mostly smooth, I coated it with 3-4 thick coats of hex flex, the same paint I use to coat my Eva foamwork. I found painting and treating TPU like foamwork in its finishing and paints worked really well. From there, it was then coated in the zinc metallic paint I used for the rest of the helmets underlayer.
I didn't really get an intermediate picture here, so moving on, it was time for final assembly. I trimmed up the visor, and I use heat threaded inserts, and M5 bolts here to assemble everything together modular, which you can see one of under the eye section here.
Now it was time to show the final assembled helmet clean for the last time!
From here, it's on to weathering! Starting with a chrome dry brush across the entire helmet. I generally try for a full coverage texture here, and use the paint chipping from earlier to highlight those edges, and center highlight then with the chrome pen. I use the ink here from this pen for the rest of the dry brush as well. To dry brush, I used a pretty beat up brush, and dabbed into the silver, and stippled most of it off on the plate, before scratching the helmet up. I want it to really look like I've been down in the mud, rocks, and foliage of the battlefield. Leave no stone unturned and no helmet unscratched.
Next up to bat, was the dark wash. I prefer my dark ashes to be more muddy sludgy than straight black or grey. I used a combination of black, burnt umber, light brown, and a little bit of green to get this grime color.
Then it's just a matter of using a paper towel to dab most of it off, to really leave it dirty. I usually try to cover the whole piece all at once, so it has a little bit of sit time where it really picks up the paints.
Last step, disassemble and clean up any excess between the parts! Something to note, I made sure to really weather the visor to help it blend in during this process.
From here, in the next post, we get into electronics!
First things first the, the neck guard!
Let's start with a word of affirmation, Failure is always an option, and bot did I fail! My initial plan for the neck guard was to mold and cast it. However, the first time I molded it, I got a lot of things wrong, and the mold had a lot of holes, and problems with the interior texture. So, with that, I tried something crazy. I mixed up a batch of silicone, poured it in the existing mold, and shoved the positive back in there, to try to fill in the gaps.
To my credit, this actually surprisingly worked, despite being one of the biggest messes I've made in the shop. However, next was the cast, and I had the completely wrong kind of polyurethane! Apparently the one I had was for like casting fake bricks or really porous looking stones.
All this to say, after this catastrophic failure of it crumbling as I pulled it out, DeltaAlphaZulu gave me a great piece of advice, why don't I just print it out of TPU? Well, I decided to give it a shot, fixed up my printers, and started printing it. The print came out with a really nice finish, so now it was time to sand it.
I used 120 grit sandpaper, but next time I would probably go a Little lower grit. TPU is notoriously hard to sand. Once I got it mostly smooth, I coated it with 3-4 thick coats of hex flex, the same paint I use to coat my Eva foamwork. I found painting and treating TPU like foamwork in its finishing and paints worked really well. From there, it was then coated in the zinc metallic paint I used for the rest of the helmets underlayer.
I didn't really get an intermediate picture here, so moving on, it was time for final assembly. I trimmed up the visor, and I use heat threaded inserts, and M5 bolts here to assemble everything together modular, which you can see one of under the eye section here.
Now it was time to show the final assembled helmet clean for the last time!
From here, it's on to weathering! Starting with a chrome dry brush across the entire helmet. I generally try for a full coverage texture here, and use the paint chipping from earlier to highlight those edges, and center highlight then with the chrome pen. I use the ink here from this pen for the rest of the dry brush as well. To dry brush, I used a pretty beat up brush, and dabbed into the silver, and stippled most of it off on the plate, before scratching the helmet up. I want it to really look like I've been down in the mud, rocks, and foliage of the battlefield. Leave no stone unturned and no helmet unscratched.
Next up to bat, was the dark wash. I prefer my dark ashes to be more muddy sludgy than straight black or grey. I used a combination of black, burnt umber, light brown, and a little bit of green to get this grime color.
Then it's just a matter of using a paper towel to dab most of it off, to really leave it dirty. I usually try to cover the whole piece all at once, so it has a little bit of sit time where it really picks up the paints.
Last step, disassemble and clean up any excess between the parts! Something to note, I made sure to really weather the visor to help it blend in during this process.
From here, in the next post, we get into electronics!
- Member DIN
- S770
Part 2 of this huge update is electronics! I constructed all the parts modular with plugs between each piece. This started with the back plate, where I started with power, then on to the two control boards, and their signals put which I labeled as I went.
Once it was all neatly tucked away, I added a little hot glue just in the control board section, to glue the board into the helmet so it couldn't move around, and to hold the wires in place so I could press fit on the back panel.
Next it was just triming down and adding the connectors, keeping track of what goes were, and adding a blank pin for forced registration the plugs being the correct way around later.
From there, I moved on to the jaw assembly. This was sort of a pain, because I shortened the camera's wire connection, which happened to be really really small wires. This holds the voice mic, the box fans, and the camera
After that, it was the rest of the front hood electronics, which was the hearing speakers and mics, the voice speaker, the visor blower fans, and the screen, which gets a little lense put in front of it for focus.
After that, if was final assembly, and testing of the components. I also added the padding to the helmet, which was just a helmet padding kit from Amazon
Here is what the internal visibility looks like, it's black and white for infrared view when in dark environments.
At this point, the helmet was complete, and it was time for glamour shots!!!
Once it was all neatly tucked away, I added a little hot glue just in the control board section, to glue the board into the helmet so it couldn't move around, and to hold the wires in place so I could press fit on the back panel.
Next it was just triming down and adding the connectors, keeping track of what goes were, and adding a blank pin for forced registration the plugs being the correct way around later.
From there, I moved on to the jaw assembly. This was sort of a pain, because I shortened the camera's wire connection, which happened to be really really small wires. This holds the voice mic, the box fans, and the camera
After that, it was the rest of the front hood electronics, which was the hearing speakers and mics, the voice speaker, the visor blower fans, and the screen, which gets a little lense put in front of it for focus.
After that, if was final assembly, and testing of the components. I also added the padding to the helmet, which was just a helmet padding kit from Amazon
Here is what the internal visibility looks like, it's black and white for infrared view when in dark environments.
At this point, the helmet was complete, and it was time for glamour shots!!!
