Open-source motorcycle intercom
Talk to your whole group in real time, keep your music and calls, and own every line of code and every wire. OpenHelmet runs on boards you can buy today and firmware you can read, fork and flash.
- Riders
- up to 8
- Battery
- 16h+ mesh
- License
- MIT
- Accounts
- None
More detail Less detail
One radio frame - 20 ms
shown 100× slower
Every rider owns a reserved slice of airtime, fifty times a second. The radio isn't best effort, it's on a timetable, so your voice arrives when it should instead of when the airwaves are quiet. Silent riders send nothing, which saves battery.
Where we are
on the map.
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Two boards, one conversation
Real-time group voice on a single ESP32-S31 off-the-shelf board.
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Phone audio
Music, navigation and calls over Bluetooth, alongside the mesh group.
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Voice activation
Silence costs no airtime. Wind noise is not sent through the mesh.
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Multi-hop mesh
Voices relay through the riders in between. Mesh topology and roles reshape based on the signal between neighbor nodes.
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Channels, buttons, voice prompts
Everything you need without looking down. Channels are LED colors. All button clicks have voice prompts, so you know what you clicked.
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Long-range radio companion
An optional nRF52840 chip for a dedicated mesh radio with its own antenna. Only 8 dBm (6 mw).
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Dedicated board schematic
Drawn in KiCad, with a radio amplifier (nRF21540) for extra range. Boosts 8 dBm to 21 dBm.
- You are here
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Circuit board layout
Turning the schematic into something that fits on a helmet.
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All-day battery
Power tuning toward 16+ hours of active riding.
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Real rides
Wind, rain, tunnels and a dozen riders strung out along a pass.
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End‑to‑end encryption
What's said in the group stays in the group.
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Choose your radio
Pick between built-in and long-range mesh radios.
Three buttons.
Gloves on.
No app, no menu, no screen. Tap or hold one of three big buttons and a short spoken prompt tells you what happened. Try it below!
In your helmet
Mesh on. Channel green.
| You want to | Do this |
|---|---|
| Change mesh volume | Tap − + |
| Change Bluetooth volume | Hold Play/pause and tap - + |
| Play or pause music, answer or end a call | Tap Play/pause |
| Skip a song | While music plays, hold − + for 1s |
| Switch channel | Music paused, hold − + for 1s |
| Turn the group mesh on or off | Hold Play/pause for 2-5s |
| Pair your phone | Hold Play/pause for 6s |
Three ordinary push buttons, wired to the board. The button logic is one small module in the firmware, so if you don't like the timings, change them.
Two boards,
one job each.
The ESP32-S31 handles everything you hear: microphone, voice codec, mixing and your phone. The nRF52840 handles everything on air: the radio, the timetable and the group. Both are off-the-shelf dev boards, joined by a handful of wires.
Waitlist
Save me a spot
on the
first ride.
We'll write when there's hardware you can order, and maybe once before that if we need testers. No newsletter, no spam.
Press, shops, clubs, partnerships, or anything else: jaimeconde@etik.com