Crazy Hat Day! (with Pictures)

It's been a little while since I published anything. I've been super busy lately, working on many projects but not finishing much. So, to satisfy my need to show off what I've been working on, here is the crazy hat I made for my daughter's school's Crazy Hat Day!

Most of the materials came from my winnings in various Halloween contests, so special thanks to the Instructables staff and Coolneon.com for the EL Wire, and to the folks at Makezine for the TinyCylon Larson Scanner!

Crazy Hat Day is part of Dr. Seuss week each year at my daughter's school. She's been going there since the second grade and I've made her a crazy hat every year. The first one was a very last minute affair, just a bunch of tin foil scrunched up to be a circlet and a couple of antennae. The year after that (the year I'd started working with electronics) I wired up a bunch of LEDs sticking out of a pink straw hat she had. Last year I built a 3x3x3 LED matrix and glued it along with my arduino to the top of her hat, wrapped the whole thing in a hot pink wig, and sent her on her way.

Since this is her last year at this school, I decided to outdo myself. I cobbled this thing together over a couple of nights, gluing some of the EL wire in a spiral and threading the rest through. The topknot is some leftover fiber optic wire I had, held in place over some color changing RGB LEDs. The Larson Scanner was a last minute addition, as I finally decided on what to buy from the the maker shed with my gift certificate, and it happened to get here the night before Crazy Hat Day.

This is the craziest hat ever, so I hope you enjoyed it! Leave comment and a rating, and don't forget to subscribe, I've got lots of big things in the making!

Also, here's a little video of what it looks like when it's running: