BuildingThis time I wanted to create a fancy blinking hat for parties (and room accessory). You can use an Arduino to loop through the effects, or an ESP like in this example to make it controlable over WiFi.
Unfortunately, my DIY market was offering 15L white buckets only. If you plan your own hat, I suggest you at least 29cm in diameter and 35cm in height (20-25L).
I bought a helmet and extracted the inlay. The meme was printed on a sheet of paper and cut out. I removed the holder and the meme from the bucket. I started with a boxcutter, but it got difficult on the eyes. Later I switched to a soldering iron, which was way easier! I glued the black grid into the eyes and mouth, to make them look black (and hide my face).
I bought some WS2812B led strips (IP30) and glued more than 7m into the bucket with hot glue. I have 10 rows and ~45 LEDs per row. I soldered everything together, including the ESP8266 ESP12-E and the USB cable (for power).
1 / 2 • glueing the strips
Afterwards I glued some black felt inside and the helmet inlay to make the hat fit better on my head. In my case, i put the power bank in my trowser's back pocket and had a long USB cable. If the hat is bigger, you can fix it inside.
So far, I have only uploaded a default FastLed WebServer to the hat, to control the patterns of the hat. You can find the code here: https://github.com/jasoncoon/esp8266-fastled-webserver
My power bank only serves 2 ampere! You need to take care on the output of the led stripe. With white and high brightness, each LED will consume up to 60mA, which will blow your hat ;) So take down the brightness, that's quite good enough for dark party locations and make it consume max. 2000mA for bright patterns. It should be enough to serve 20h of party-light with my capacity.
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