LED Santa Hat
The Idea
I bought a santa hat that lit up at a Christmas market in Germany a few years ago. It was somewhat limited however (see photo); it only had a few single-color LEDs, the quality of the hat itself was pretty low and the only options for controlling the lights was always on or blinking. Eventually it broke and I decided I could do better.
The Build
For this project, I bought the following:
| What | Where | Why | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Santa Hat | Amazon | It was the nicest one I could find on Amazon at the time | $10 |
| Gemma M0 | Adafruit | Microcontroller to control the LEDs | $10 |
| Lithium Ion Battery - 2500mAh | Adafruit | Battery to run the hat | $15 |
| 1 Meter of Neopixels | Adafruit | The LEDs! | $25 |
| Lilypad Button | Sparkfun | I wanted a physical button for interfacing with the microcontroller and this was the smallest/cheapest one I could find | $2 |
| Total | ~$62 | ||
Once I had all the pieces, it was a simple matter to solder them together and tuck them into brim of the hat I’d bought. The software was a little bit trickier. Since the microcontroller that I’d bought supported CircuitPython it was relatively simple to program it to respond to the buttons and run the LEDs. The code for that lives here.