hats off to this led chapeau

geek art & craft | strange and wonderful

October 18th, 2007 post a comment stumble it! by: technabob

While you might think that top hats went out of fashion a hundred years ago, this funky hat hack uses modern technology to bring the classic cap into a new era.

LedHat

The LedHat is a handcrafted wonder that involved soldering a grid of hundreds of individual green LEDs around the crown of a top hat. A microcontroller circuit enables the hat to display a variety of computer-programmed animations.

click to view this video clip

I especially love the Space Invaders and Pac-Man patterns. Very cool indeed.

The initial version of the hat is a one-off, which took over a year for its builder (a guy by the name of Nick) to make it all come together. Nick has been kind enough to share a diary of the painstaking construction process here if you care to try and make one for yourself.

While I don’t know if I’d walk down the street wearing one of these, I’m sure it’s the life of the party at raves (assuming that anyone still goes to raves.)