Pseudonymous Mandalorian fan and maker “Residual Entropy,” hereafter merely “Entropy,” has constructed a cardboard helmet prop with a distinction: it is powered by a Raspberry Pi, providing an augmented actuality show with thermal imaginative and prescient capabilities.

“So, final Halloween I adopted [Dustin McLean’s] tutorial on tips on how to make a cardboard Boba Fett helmet, however I finished wanting the half with the little rangefinder factor — as a result of, for that, I had different plans,” Entropy explains of the mission, which mixes the cardboard reproduction with very actual electronics.

The guts of the construct — outdoors the helmet itself, in fact — is a Raspberry Pi 3 Mannequin B single-board pc. “It is not technically vital,” Entropy admits, “but it surely’s handy, and there is additionally different future stuff that is going to rely on it.” The Raspberry Pi talks to a Espressif ESP8266-based improvement board, which is linked to an infrared array sensor on the highest of the helmet.

“Mainly, it is sort of like a thermal digicam,” Entropy says, “besides in alternate for not being $10,000 or extra it solely has a decision of 8×8 pixels — so, yep, 64 pixels whole.” Lastly, the microcontroller additionally hyperlinks to a small OLED show held in entrance of the wearer’s eye on an arm.

The 64-pixel enter from the digicam is interpolated and displayed on the display, offering a real-life thermal imaginative and prescient functionality — however that is not all Entropy’s helmet can do. By getting the Raspberry Pi concerned, the helmet also can pull down map imagery from OpenStreetMap, dither it suitably for the one-bit show, and supply a dwell mini-map show above the thermal imaginative and prescient overlay.

“Clearly, there is a ton of lag, ‘cuz it has to make use of the gradual telephone connection to speak to the pc, then get the picture, then remodel it, after which ship it over a really gradual USB serial hyperlink,” Entropy admits. “I simply do not feel like I am getting via to you about how terrible and sketchy and horrible and glitchy the hyperlink between the microcontroller and the Raspberry Pi is.

Regardless of this, in case you fancy constructing your personal you may discover the supply code on GitHub beneath the reciprocal GNU Affero Common Public License 3.