I recently purchased a "Santa dad hat" online since I've been recently been wearing dad hats with varying styles such as a Mario, Luigi, and Wario dad hats. So, being a Christmas season lover, I decided to google "Santa dad hat" and found exactly what I had envisioned. After a week my baby came in and it was everything I asked for; truly Christmas came early (it came in November, before American Thanksgiving had even passed).
Pictured above: The Santa Dad Hat
After sometime, like a mad genius, I decided that this was not enough. I had to be extra. I wanted to somehow attach LED's so I can have the Greek letters "Theta Tau", my fraternity, on the front. It was impulsive, and I only have <3 weeks left to complete it, but God as my witness it shall be done.
Some design considerations
- Regular, single coloured LED's or something akin to Adafruit's Neopixels?
- How would the wiring be done in either case
- If using neopixels, how big should I make the matrix
- Use what micro controller?
- Control it wirelessly?
- Where would the micro controller be physically?
- Power source?
Second design consideration: What Micro Controller
I had gone through a lot of thinking over the first and third points. For the second point, I knew that if I used Adafruit's Feather line of micro controllers, I could easily swap out a basic board, the 32u4 Adalogger, for one with bluetooth capability, the 32u4 Bluefruit LE (both of which I already own), with some simple addition of code.
First design consideration: LED Type
If I used, say, a bunch of regular looking LED's that were yellow either by the type of material made, or by some different coloured plastic housing, I could easily, but tediously, poke the leads of the LED's into the hat, in the pattern I wanted, and solder the leads in parallel. That way, I could program some different functions of blinking, fading in and out, etc. with it. The issue is that it would only be a niche image, and if I wanted to do something similar, but with some other image, I would have to desolder the existing design, and solder the new one; very tedious and time consuming.
If I used neopixels, I could use any design I want, anytime, for basically eternity. I could also make it display more patterns such as a side to side scrolling image.The issue I was mainly concerned with was the coding. It has been a while since I've even touched some Arduino type micro controller, let alone a Raspberry Pi for the laptop project. Also, attaching the strips to the hat might be an issue since I may want to remove the strips in the future and salvage the hat. The size of the matrix would have to depend on the surface area of the hat that is viewable from the front.
Third design consideration: Wireless Capability
If I choose not to use wireless, I would need to somehow create an opening in the hat to allow access for switches somewhere. I'd rather keep the holes I make in this hat to a minimum. If I used bluetooth, I'd need to figure out what code I need to use, which is more complicated than say, using some makeshift breadboard setup and basically sticking it to the side of the hat.
Fourth design consideration: Micro Controller Location
Also something that was almost decided immediately, the hat has a lot of room above where my head is (space is towards the cone). I can simply stick it inside somewhere in there and/or rest it on my head. I'm not going for comfort, but function, ultimately.
Fifth design consideration: Power Source
More of a formality of documentation in writing this down. I know I want to be portable, so the decision to go with either a li-po battery or my portable charger was basically instant rather than carrying around a wall adapter and using that. Also, the battery would also sit inside the hat somehow. I'll test out how both feel in the hat later on, but right now, a portable power source is what I'll ultimately be using.
I decided on using bluetooth, and the neopixels. Though the more complicated combination, I figure the functionality will be infinitely more useful and cool looking.
Keeping this record of what I'm doing takes a lot more time than I thought it would since I've been way more into actually building the darn thing. I don't want to do thing project and then write a final report since I guarantee that me later won't have the thoughts as the me who is currently making the thing. Also, this way I can make record of any failures in real-time. To compensate (kinda), I've been keeping a notebook of brief and will try to show some of the relevant pages so you can see my thought process.
Alright, let's get 'er done.
P.S. An idea for use after Christmas: some sort of Harry Potter sorting hat. It'll choose a random hat whenever I send an input and display one of the 4 Hogwarts houses. That'll get me some street cred.
