Amazing Transparency Changing Helmet! (PDLC)

this is an ODST helmet from the Halo video games with a custom visor I designed to electronically switch between opaque and transparent custom RGB LED backlighting as well as some awesome light modes and functions and in this video I'm going to walk you through how I built [Music] it possibly my favorite thing about having a decent sized YouTube channel is the opportunity to reach out and collaborate with some incredible makers I've been a massive fan of the Halo game since I was a little kid and I reached out to an incredible Instagram maker called enforce props to see if he'd want to take one of his awesome Halo helmets and let me embed some L MasterTech controls in Arduino electronics and so we decided to start with a helmet and we chose two main projects to focus on it would be awesome to figure out how to do a visor that could switch between transparent and opaque which frankly I didn't know how to do but I was pretty sure there would be some way and then secondly some customizable embedded LED backlighting which I was a little more confident and that was a little more in my wheelhouse I had some of the basic technology components in mind but I really had no idea what the final end result would be and I definitely had no idea how much work it was going to take to get there so in this video I'm going to show you how I got to the point where I have a helmet that can change between between transparent and opaque and has a full LED grid of back lighting with adjustable colors and mode settings and also I don't usually say stuff like this near the beginning of the video but this video and this project were a ton of work consider leaving a like on the channel and subscribing to the channel it'll help me out a ton if you want to see more big projects like this now let me show you more about this project so he sent me a resin cast of this St helmet which is just so super high quality it feels awesome it's fairly lightweight but it's super sturdy one of the first things I want to start by doing is building in a visor that can automatically switch between transparent and opaque and then I think we're going to try to embed some pretty cool adjustable RGB LEDs into the visor Zone and then I'll ship it back to him where he'll finish and paint it and it should be a pretty awesome end product now you may notice in addition to the ODST helmet here I've got a Halo EOD helmet here and I just wanted to show you guys how freaking cool his stuff is and we're going to do some videos with this at a later date but we're going to focus on the ODST helmet for today now my first thought when I got this helmet and we talked about switching between a see-through visor and a uh shielded or mirrored visor was basically two separate visors but then when I wore this and I started looking into the dimensions and the space available inside I pretty quickly realized any anything even a tiny DC motor to cause one visor to slide down and another to come back up was not going to fit inside these helmets they're pretty tight to the form factor of your face so I decided we were going to have to find a way to switch between transparent and opaque using one piece of material now with the realization that I was going to need one piece of material that could automatically switch between these two it led me to a technology called pdlc smart film and in its normal state it looks just like a normal flexible not see-through piece of plastic but when you apply voltage to it it becomes completely see-through almost like magic and I love this technology and I pretty much knew as soon as I got a sample of it that I wanted to find a way to incorporate this into this helmet so actually the first thing I'm going to do is take this clear visor that he sent me and I'm going to get that tucked up in here all right so it took me a minute but I got the clear visor that uh enforce props sent me uh already on the helmet and I think it looks pretty cool the space the clearance around your head is pretty tight so we're going to have to make sure that that film gets right up next to it all right I got the helmet with the clear visor I've got the smart film marked with approximately where to try to cut it so that it'll be exactly the right form factor to sit inside there only thing I don't know cuz I've never tried it is can we actually cut this stuff and will it keep working without messing with the electronics so we'll see all right so I'm obviously pretty pumped that that worked first try nothing ever works for me first try so now the challenging part is going to be uh getting it connected in there and then we'll do some testing uh and make sure that it actually looks cool so here's another look at the test setup a DC power supply fed through a potentiometer and the potentiometer is being used to change the voltage flowing through the helmet I've got the sheet in there behind the helmet and you can clearly see the film is having some like morphing effect but it's not exactly as prominent as I'd hoped it's still fairly interesting but it's not exactly the effect I was going for so unfortunately I think I need to pop this visor out here and rethink my strategy possibly putting the smart film on the outside rather than the inside I think we're going to have to take a few steps back to make sure we get this thing right a little deviation from the original plan now the visor just comes straight down in the front because I'm just using the smart film what I found is there's just really no good way to get that two piece uh shape in it and use this smart film it sort of messes with the electronics I hope this angle works I'm going to put the phone inside the helmet and then I'm going to turn the uh film on and off a few times now what I'm hoping we'll see with a light in the helmet is this transition from opaque to see through will really become a lot more obvious all right I'm actually pretty happy with the uh performance of the smart film I think there's still some stuff to Tinker with what it's time to do is embed some LEDs in the helmet back lighting will really enhance uh the smart film effect of the visor as well but then two I also am pretty sure that the back lighting when we do some sort of color changing effect will look really cool now I want to use these uh individually addressable neopixel LED lights so uh they're not very wide and they're super cool because you can control a bunch of Lights in series with just one digital output pin from something like an Arduino so I've got this like hobby kind of like press board cardboard and I'm going to chop up four little strips and then I'm going to see if I can put them kind of on the four angles here above and below the face and we'll see how that looks all right so I've got four of these uh components put together with four neopixels each and I have them labeled with the directions that the uh Communications are going to flow so I've got bottom right one and the idea is to kind of Mount it right about here so it'll shine up at the face area and it can be jumped with the smart film wires coming from the electronics pack which will be in the back and then these four will kind of go around the visor in a rectangle but you'll never notice that it's four separate components because we'll program them to all kind of work in tandem so uh we need to solder the wires together then once we've got the four soldered together we will do some programming make sure that we like the styles of it and then we'll actually mount it to the visor and we'll do some testing all right so with a lot of soldering work I got these four strips of four LEDs each uh hooked up in series and I labeled them top left top right bottom left and bottom right with the directionality as well so we can see the direction they'll go in and right now I have it just hooked up to kind of like the minimal Arduino project I could have going with just some pulsing and then like a sequence to turn them off just to illustrate kind of the functionality we've got going on here with 16 lights so the next step now that we've proven out this works is actually going to be Mount these in the helmet and then the cool part is as long as this is easily accessible outside of the helmet we'll be able to change how these operate and uh the sequences and colors and flashing and pulsing and things like that later and then I have the uh actual tint changing on the visor I accidentally triggered my smart lights okay I have no explanation for that okay but basically I have these four different quadrants and I think what I'm getting now is possibly some weird interference just because I'm using some really long length of wire so I'm going to try to clean up my solder connections and uh then see if I can get this thing powered off of my battery packs instead of uh off of the USB here okay so it looks a little bit messy on a breadboard but I'm going to have two of these batteries uh wired in series so that should provide around 20 volts to this board I'm going to control the uh tint on the helmet using that potentiometer and then hopefully that's uh an okay amount of power to power this Arduino Nano which I will then uh have controlling these neopixel LED lights um and then last thing is I've got a push button which I want to use to change colors and modes on the system so there's not that much going on but the breadboard can look a little messy here we go okay well the lights went nuts for a minute there okay kind of to my dismay cuz it's going to require some rework um as soon as I plug the lights into a much shorter cable the uh blinking went away the flickering went away and they work um pretty much perfectly so my theory of those real long signal cables uh creating some interference is probably right which which means we got to think of a little bit of a redesign here I have swapped for a more high quality push button that I probably should have started with in the first place and now I'm getting really consistent clicking and control the final thing I need to do is cut in the uh final code for color changing and then a second one for switching modes uh so that's a little bit of code which isn't that exciting so I will probably leave a link to the code that I end up using and then I want to zip this thing into the helmet and don't look at the mess I'm working on it okay no smoke is a good sign the lights are on is a good sign now let's mess with the transparency oh man from the side it is super clear but here I mean that's sweet I can see the phone now I can't see anything oh yeah and this is a great time to tell you about the sponsor of today's video PCB way PCB way has everything makers and hobbyists need to take their Hobby designs and turn them into highquality production level Parts while they specialize in printed circuit boards and printed circuit board assembly they also have everything you need to turn highquality 3D printed parts and metal CNC prototypes around in no time at all like let's say you have a uh fantasy football league that punishes the lowest score every week and you got tasked with it and you want to make something cool battery powered using an Arduino that people are going to wear around to let everyone know they suck at fantasy football well PCB way has everything you need to design an electronic board that embeds neopixel LEDs in it has an uino driving it for code and input leads for a 9volt DC battery every time I've worked with PCB way the service has been extremely high quality pricing is super reasonable and the turnaround time is great so be sure to check them out and thank you to PCB way for sponsoring today's video okay I honestly didn't get a lot of good footage today because it was just a lot of packaging the electronics in inside the helmet and making sure my head could still fit so it wasn't that cool while filming but the end product is so cool and I'll try to keep the electrical design as simple as I can I know I want to power the system from batteries so you can be mobile while wearing this and I know I have to have the Arduino close to the visor because the LEDs can't handle very long runs and I know I want to have control of the transparency colors and modes from some sort of control box so the basic layout is going to be hide the Arduino inside the helmet have wires from the helmet to a control box and then wires from the control box to a battery pack since my smart film visor requires about 20 volts DC to actually go transparent I speced out two of these rechargeable 9.6v nickel metal hydride batteries wired in series and to get power from here to the control box I just need two wires now an Arduino Nano is very likely to overheat or malfunction if we put 20 volts straight into it so I'm using a DC to D DC voltage step down transducer that can take that 20 volts in and output a lower 7 to 9 volts DC then I have two push buttons going back to the Arduino one for color and one for mode and they're going to take the 3.3 volt signal from the Arduino and that's what's going to switch the digital signal on or off then I'm going to have a third control point in the Box either a potentiometer or just a push button that will switch the visor voltage between 20 volts so fully transparent and 0 volts and fully off to accomplish this functionality I need seven wires between the control box and the helmet zone now inside the helmet I have the Arduino Nano itself which is receiving voltage in from the DC power converter and a ground signal from the batteries and then two digital inss from the colorin mode push buttons and then the 3.3 volt pin is going back down to the control box to power those buttons then the visor is the simplest one it's just receiving 0 volts or 20 volts based on the output of that transparency p push button then to power those LEDs we use the Arduino to send 5 volts 0 volts and a digital out pin capable of doing pulse with modulation so the total sum of the circuitry can seem a little bit complicated but if you look at it as a series of simple components then it all starts making sense okay this is the helmet not powered up this is the helmet uh in its like loaded default State you have the ability to switch between transparent and opaque just like that and then I have in colors so you can do red green blue pink yellow white and you can switch to transparent and opaque and then I have modes programmed in so I have bottom top pulse which is probably my favorite and then I have back and forth bouncing top and bottom and then I have a ring which I don't know if you'd ever use this but it's kind of fun and then I have all on so those are the colors and the modes all right you guys that is going to do it for this video it was so much fun to make and to build this but it was also a ton of work and I am super excited to send this back to enforce props and see him finish it up and combine it with his full ODST Armor sets so if you like the video please consider leaving a like on it check out enforce props on Instagram let him know that you like the collaboration as well sure to subscribe to L Master Tech cuz we have another Halo helmet and a lot more cool upcoming Robotics and big build projects that we're going to be doing and you're not going to want to miss it thank you so much to enforce props thank you to pcbway for sponsoring the video thank you to my patreon supporters for making all of this possible if you have any questions about what you saw today or ideas for what you want to see next let me know about in the comments below as always thanks for watching and see you next time thanks bye