Luxeon Helmet

designed and built by Kevin McCormick

Luxeon LEDs are (or were, as of August 2002 when the Helmet was built) the most powerful LEDs in the world. Even when you work with them every day, as I do, they never seem to get any less shocking and awesome. They come in special packages to handle the heat they generate (each LED consumes one watt of power) and they are quite small, so the point source of light they produce is intense.

So it seemed like a good idea to put forty of them on a surplus U.S. Army helmet.

Coordinates were marked for four rings of LEDs

Small PCBs holding Luxeons were epoxied in place, and wires were attached.

The wires were glued down, bundled, and routed to a fan-cooled driver box at the rear.

The Luxeon Helmet was designed explicitly for Burning Man. I wanted to have an LED device that I could wear around that would not be encumbering. The arm strips look very nice, but six pushbuttons Velcroed to one's fingers gets in the way. A single umbilical exits the back of the helmet and hangs down the wearer's neck and back, then attaches to a waist belt holding a battery pack and control box.

Helmet complete; testing and working on the firmware for the controller.

Battery pack and controller

Each Luxeon is dimmable to 256 intensity levels. The driver at the rear of the helmet receives signals from the control box and modulates the LEDs. The control box has four pushbuttons and a three digit LED display for selecting and indicating different modes, and a microcontroller inside generates the patterns that are displayed on the helmet.

At Burning Man

On the playa, the Luxeon Helmet was dazzlingly bright. People who knew what to look for could see it from half a mile away. With the helmet on, flashlights were unnecessary for a group of a dozen people. The modulation speed was intentionally slowed down to produce stippled trails floating in midair.