Protogen Head Build
It all started by building this module with some old dodgy Nixie tubes I have. The one digit in all of the tubes was bad.
The shot of all three soviet chips, sadly all three seemed to die. They are not that reliable & there are not any real good modern equivalents.
The bottom of the Nixie & driver PCB. Nice neat wiring. The wires were pulled from a laptop LVDS cable. Always handy for signal wire.
The Nixie tubes hooked up to an Arduino running a test program that cycled though all the numbers. It was going to be for displaying internet error codes on the Protogen nose. However one my one the digits started dying.
The front of the helmet after printing, gluing together & giving the base layers of paint. One part at the top did start to fail, but not to a point it caused issues.
Part of the rear of the mask also started to fail. However I was quite lucky in the way it did as it created a gap I was able to install servos & run wires. This has also had base coats added.
So I ordered two Waveshare 1.28 inch 240x240 round LCD's, I did want bigger but cost & time were two factors I was fighting against. SO I compromised & ordered two small round displays. The next challenge was getting them to play a GIF. I also modded the ear vents for the mask to fit these new displays.
After a lot of faffing around with getting a GIF working I did succeed. I then created a custom GIF with assets my partner was able to extract from a game I love called Distance. Once that was don't I then had to lean how to make a GIF & program it on the ESP32. Once this was done & had the Distance logo rotating round. This could sit & wait for the rest of the head to be built.
The LED display mounts for the face. This had to be split into 4 parts that were then printed on two printers at the same time.
The modified ear vents 3D printed for the round LCD's to mount in.
Everything test fitted together.
Fur sowed together & loosely fitting.
More programming & testing of the round displays. These took a lot of work to get working correctly.
Test fit of the round LCD in an ear vent.
Holes were cut for the servos to poke though so the ears can actuate when the head moves bringing the character to life.
Ears fully wired up & programmed. I did originally use mercury tilt switched but after some bitching from my partner & a friend I swapped them out for boring metal ball in a tube types.
So with the original Nixie's failing I removed them from the HV & Arduino board & soldered on a driver chip I nicked from an soviet Nixie module. I then wired a rather interesting Nixie tube to the board with solid core wire so I could more easily pose it.
The Nixie tube sitting just off the back of the Arduino PCB. The diode on the board is not used, but I could not be assed to remove it.
The Nixie tube used was not your standard number one, but one that would be used as the function indicator in some thing like a multimeter. I lost the original code that I wrote for the first version built was basic enough to re-code from scratch. Afterwards i gave it a 4 second delay between the segments of the display. Also with the plastic frame there was only really room for one Nixie tube.
I got a whole load of MAX7219 displays. They came in lots of four. so some cutting was needed that was done on my partners CNC machine. Also one had to be repaired as the clock pin had randomly broke during the CNC process. Once again my partner debugged & repaired the issue.
It took way to meany hours to get to this point. Way to meany of the MAX7219 library's ether did not work or were just to difficult to even get the display to show basic images. I ended up using a tutorial combined with someone Protogen code to figure out how to program mine & this was the first custom output.
Right side of the face.
Left side of the face.
The back with the two Arduino's for the LED displays as the library could only run a max of 8 display's at once. So I just used two Arduino's. The Nixie driver board was also mounted in the front with hot glue. Sadly I had to cave & use hot glue in the end as I did not really have any good mounting options without spending the time to build a custom model.
Nixie nose looking really cool. Don't know why no one else has added Nixie tubes to a Protogen head.
The head fully painted but awaiting the electronics to be installed.
The round displays installed in the ear vents after they had been painted. I also added in a mesh for airflow & to allow me to hear when wearing the helmet.
The protogen helmet with the side displays installed & the head fully painted.
Arduino & tilt sensors that control the ear servos.
Parts of the buck for the vacuum molding printing. As I have two printers I had both printing these at the same time. While this was going on I also upgraded to silent driver boards in both printers making it much nicer to sit in the room while they printed.
Buck halfway printed. The blue filament was crap & broke, so i had to glue that back together.
Finished buck all glued together. The blue & black works nicely together, not that it matters.
The last quarter gluing in place with good old Poundland epoxy. I also used the clamps that came with the epoxy to hold the segment together so they would stay aligned while the glue set.
The Protogen with all the electronics installed. The ears at this point still needed to be wired up.
The head with the ears wired up & head fur permanently installed. The head fur is lovingly refereed to as the "Trump Mullet". I have also at this point programed the eyes to blink.
So then came the neck fur. This turned out to not be to bad following the guide of a YouTube video that had an easy way to create a neck without a manikin head. The thread only broke once this time which means I was leaning to use the sowing machine properly.
The neck fur looking pretty good after having been mostly sown together.
The inside on the neck fur of the inside. I added in extra materials to for the part to go over the shoulders. It worked out quite nicely. I do still wonder if I souls of added a zip as it is more difficult to get on now.
The neck is attached with small magnets. In hindsight I should of used stronger magnets, but that is how you lean. The first model can have all the noob mistakes. The neck also needed to be a bit larger at the point it attacked to the Protogen head.
Me trying it on with the neck for the first time. All the electronics are wired up & powered up. The eyes blink, the ears twitch & move with my head movement. The Nixie scrolls though its segment & the GIF's run on the ear displays.
Maybe if I built this thing a body, it would come alive in the middle of the night & try & kill you.
The ears were being worked on The foam inserts were being test fitted & had been shaped.
Sade view of the head with the ears being test fitted with the foam inserts.
Foam inserts fitted & the ears attached to the head.
Another view of the head with finished ears.
The head sitting in the car on its first outing.
The Protogen head being worn by a visitor at the museum.
Now for what is probably the hardest part of the build. Vacuum-forming the visor. This was the first frame attempt. Use just 8 metal clamps because that is all I had. Plastic ones would have been just as effective.
Well that went as well as expected. The clamps failed & on top of that the buck we 3D printed started to warp & melt. Who would of thought a low melting point plastic PLA buck would of melted under the heat from a melted PETG sheet of plastic that just came out of an oven.
Take two. Use screws & bolts to hold the PETG plastic & put some Plaster Of Paris in the buck to stop it from melting. We should be good right?...
Oh... at least its better. In this case the PETG was left in the oven a little to long & did not evenly heat. There was a lot of webbing from where & rammed it down to fast & adjusted it mid way down. The base of the buck also imploded.
So I cut the imploded corner out as it was beyond recovery. A new section was 3D printed in the black non-shit PLA.
So it was glued together & filled tot the brim with plaster. My partner also coated the front surface with plaster & also sanded it down nice & smooth. This allowed the print lines to not become visible on the plastic once molded.
The vacuum form setup was not complex. Some cheap wood from B&Q was used as the base. Was sealed with silicon & screws. The vacuum delivery system was a Henry & Hetty vacuum cleaner. We used a foot switch to turn the vacuum on when the plastic had been placed over the buck.
The third attempt at making the visor. Was very successful. Ended up being reasonably clear to view the convention though.
The forth version. Came out roughly the same as the third but maybe was pulled out the oven a little to early as the sides did not completely adhere to the buck. It also was not as easy to see though.
The visor trimmed down & magnets attached. Protective film still on the visor to protect it in transport. The ears ended up being complete failure as they broke & ended up looking like twitching antennas, which kind of ended up working.
Viewed from the front.
Viewed from the left side.
Viewed from the right side.
Mods & Repairs Made At The Convention
The hot glue failed & the power wire for the front set of displays ripped out. Took it to the car to do the soldering.
Once I had soldered the wires back on in the car I took it to one of two fur suite lounges & used the supplied hot glue guns to slaver on some strain relief. I also used the giant three phase industrial fans to cool the hot glue down quickly as I had an event o go to.
Another problem I had while wearing the helmet aside from a lack of space for my face due to the electronics. Was there was no ventilation fan. This meant the visor instantly fogged up when it was on.
Luckily one of the events I went to was an electronics one. I was given a 5V laptop CPU fan that was just small enough to fit in the helmet even if it did try to shave my beard. But also powerful enough to pump my breath from breathing & talking out of the bottom of the mask allowing me to actually be able to see where I was going.