Back when I started paragliding, one common concern among pilots was the danger of attaching action cameras to helmets. After several incidents, using cameras was eventually prohibited for beginners.
The issue lies primarily during launch, arguably the most dangerous phase of a flight. In a reverse launch, about half of the glider lines pass closely over your head as the wing pressurizes. In strong wind conditions, these lines can snag on a camera, potentially snapping it off the helmet or making the glider uncontrollable. This could result in you being dragged across the ground or, worse, spun backward into the mountain, and that's a scenario no one wants to deal with. This could also happen with a wing collapse caused by strong turbulence or excess pilot input in flight.
I wasn't too comfortable with the idea of dealing with these avoidable scenarios, and increasing the danger just to record my flights seemed, well, not so sane. So I had to find a safer way, that's when I decided to use the 3D printer, solver of all problems.
The idea was to make it impossible for lines to get entangled, while allowing the camera some small amount of rotation, having a small profile camera such as the GoPro 5 Session helped a lot in this regard, but as each helmet model has its own special shape, finding the exact profile of mine required some trial and error.
At first, I tried cutting a piece of paper to match the helmet's curve, but paper was too flimsy to work with. Then I remembered play dough exists.
After applying a big, colourful blob of playdough where I would like to add the camera mount, I cut it exactly in the middle with a piece of dental floss and let it dry for a day, just enough to be able to remove it roughly intact. From there I scanned the resulting profile and had a somewhat accurate representation of the helmet profile to work with.
The scanned playdough
I started approaching the real profile by iterating, I printed a 2mm profile, inspected to see where it had too much or too little material, fixed and did it again. It took about 5 tries before reaching a satisfactory result.
For a little while I though about adding a Bluetooth audio receiver to the empty space inside the mount, and integrate it to the helmet's built-in headphones, but it would require me to drill the helmet and that's another risk I didn't want to take. However, the first prototype I printed still had the slot to insert the receiver.
One of the most fragile parts of the mount was the bumpers around the camera, I was worried about them breaking with usage and making it necessary to replace the entire mount, so making them removable was an easy decision. Not only did it solve that problem, but it also let me design the bumpers to sit closer to the camera without worrying about blocking access to its cage.
After 3D printing the final iteration and bonding the mount to the helmet with double sided tape, I noticed it also helps secure the google when placing it on top of the head, not requiring side clips anymore. I took this as an opportunity to replace the old goggle clip, which had previously caused issues by snagging on lines during landing.
First fully printed prototype
I'm sure it's possible to make a more "universal" mount that looks like this one and is equally snag-proof... Maybe with a two-part mount design and using flexible bumpers it could work.
I will not be uploading this project files as this mount is very specific to this helmet, and I have absolutely no idea what brand and model it is, but if someone knows and want to make one too, just send me a message and I'll gladly help!
Mount in action
Googles secure in place
Custom google clip