Wearable, 3D Printed Mark 85 Iron Man Helmet!

Do you want to impress your friends with a really cool really simple project! Well look no further, this is the project for you. This 3D printed iron man helmet requires minimal experience with Arduino and 3D printing! So let's get started!

Tools:

• 3D Printer
• Meshmixer
• Cura
• Scandy Pro
• Patience
• Soldering Iron
• Hot Glue Gun (for temporary mounting)
• 3D Printer

Parts:

• Arduino Nano
• Bread Board Connector Wires
• MG90 Servo Motors
• Gray Primer
• Painters Tape
• Red Spray Paint
• Gold Spray Paint

Make sure your clear coat is glossy before you buy it!

• Glossy Clear Coat
• Spare Filament (used for PLA welding, Example Video)
• Time
• Hot glue
• Limit Switch
• 6x3MM Magnets
• Battery

Screws:

• M3x12
• M3x8

You need to download three programs:

UltiMaker Cura

• Cura is a very powerful and popular 3D Printing slicer that I use and would recommend to many making their first helmet because they have a great tree supports. Tree supports are a new type of support structure that is much faster and takes less material to print. It prints tree looking support structures, making small circles instead of big grids.

Autodesk Meshmixer

• Next is meshmixer, it is a great tool when we are scaling the helmet.

Scandy Pro

• Scandy pro will allow you to more easily get a 3d model of your head to use in meshmixer as a reference to scale with, instead of doing the math to scale it which is much harder.

Arduino IDE

• This is what we are going to use to upload or create our code.

The file I used was from CGTrader by Akira Yuming here is a link:

Mark 85 Avengers Endgame Iron Man Helmet

This is a paid file, but paid files give you the best result, it is definitely a worthwhile investment.

This is probably one of the most frustrating and difficult parts of 3D printing the helmet. What you need to do is go to Scandy pro. If you have a different 3D scanning app, or a physical 3D scanner you may use that as well, Scandy pro works best for me and it is free if you use it once a week. What you want to do is close your eyes and let another person help you. You should stand in one place while the other person goes around you SLOWLY, to get the best results. You want to try to get all around your head to make it the most accurate as this is help a lot. Once you have done that load the full helmet file and your head file, from Scandy Pro, onto Meshmixer, if you do not have the full helmet, try to insert pieces of the helmet(paid files usually come in pieces) and align and combine them so you have a full helmet, you can combine the files by selecting them with SHIFT+CLICK and combine them by doing edit>combine, that should have combined your model.

What you want to do now is to center both models (you have to do this manually) so that your helmet and head files are aligned in Meshmixer, if you would like you can add a shader to the helmet to make it translucent, I recommend the one in the top right of the shaders menu. Now you can slowly start scaling your helmet up so that when your head is on the inside no part of your head is touching the helmet (if the top of your hair is sticking out do not try to scale it up further, your hair will be pushed down a bit) The scaling system looks a bit different than usual, usually you have a percentage 100% being the original size and anything over 100% is larger and anything under 100% is smaller. However, on Meshmixer the scaling is different, the way scaling works in Meshmixer is with decimals here is what I mean, Example 1: 1.01 = 101% Example 2: 1.10 = 110% so if you move the decimal over 2 places, you have the percentage that your helmet is at.

For 3D Printing you must know and trust your printer, many of these parts take over 1 day and have to be printed overnight. If you know your printer you can enter some settings into Cura so that you use less support. I usually recommend 5% infill because the helmet should have some infill, but should not be hollow. Gyroid infill is really cool, because it is a structure that is strong while not using as much material as other infills, so I recommend Gyroid infill. For supports I usually recommend tree supports because they are once again a strong support without that much material, it also saved me many hours of printing. If you do not have access to these supports or infill, your Cura is most likely outdated and you can download an updated version, if you are using a different software like Prusa slicer or Creality slicer, just try to find the things that are the fastest and strongest to print in your software.

Make sure your clear coat is glossy before you buy it! It usually is written on the can and sometimes on the cap. You have to assemble the helmet before you do this, if you printed the files that are put together, with the names "chin" "top" and "mask", these are the ones I used because my printer(ender 3 s1 plus, 300x300 build plate) could fit, if you cannot fit one of the parts, there are files that are the helmet in smaller chunks for smaller build plates. First you will prime it, just do 1 light coat to cover it all to make sure there is no gray. Once you have primed it look at some reference images (I will put the ones I used above) and tape off wherever should be gray. Once you have done that you will paint everything gold. Now we will work on the parts separately. For the faceplate, it is fully gold so you can just put clear coat on it, be sure not to pick it up if it is sticky, I rushed a bit and picked up a part while the clear coat was still wet and it ruined the paint in that area, so be sure to let it fully dry. Congrats! You have now finished painting the first part of your helmet! Next let's move on to the chin, once again, mask off the gray and gold parts using masking tape and then paint it red on, ce that has dried put a clear coat and you are done with the second piece! Now for the top, there is no gold on this so either just keep the other gray tape or just paint it red, and once again when its dry put a clear coat on it and you are done painting it!

This is where you can stop if you just want a model, if you want to motorize and add lights to it keep reading.

This part may be a bit confusing so I will make a video instead.

Video

Here is a video.

Here is the wiring diagram that was drawn

Before mounting anything, do the wiring off the helmet and mount it after.

Now you need to open this GitHub Link

Past HelmetCode.ino into your Arduino IDE and connect your arduino nano to the blue cabl provided with your arduino, now you need to select the board and port. Tools >> Board >> Arduino Nano. Tools >> Port >> Whichever one you plugged the arduino into. Then click the Check mark at the top left to compile your code (make sure there are no errors) and then if it works click upload, which is the button on its right. Now you can play around and have fun with your helmet!