Making an interactive twinkling winter cap

Winter in Holland! No snow, no ice, but endless rain. They say the people around the arctic have 29 words for snow, Dutch people have about the same number of words for rain.

Nonetheless we have a feeling of winter as it should be.
For this winter we made an interactive cap with two colors of white fabric.

The cap gives an idea if warmth and cosiness in the cold.

When daylight diminishes it starts to twinkle. There are led's inside of a third kind of white.
The bright led's diffuse their light in a subtle way in the white materials and reinforce the idea
of warmth within a cold environment.
(The pictures actually do not show the effect in the right way, to get the led's visible on the images the effect is exaggerated.)

Step 1 Needed: tools and materials

tools:
soldering device (suited for soldering small parts, like led's)
pincher (for the wiring and removal of led legs.)
needle and thread
knitting gear

materials:
wool of two kinds and colors (in this case two whites)
Some fabric for making the inner hat with the led's
an atmega328 or other comparable microcontroller chip, with sufficient digital PINS and one (or more) analog PINS.
led's and wire (used here is the kind of wire with a very small diameter, very flexible and good to use in clothing).
2 AAA batteries in a battery holder, the cap is running on 2.8 Volts.

assistance:
a mum or an aunt to knit the cap :-)

programming:
for programming the microcontroller I have used a programmer like avrisp mkii
the chip is a atmega328 running on its internal clock 8MHz (set the fuses carefully!)
here is the file for the project, if you do not want to make it yourself:
http://www.contrechoc.com/instructables/twinkle_winter_cap_project.zip

Comments

[Kiteman]

You should get the "mum or aunt" to publish their own instructable on making the hat!

[contrechoc]

Good idea! I'll ask :-)