LED Hat

21

You might not have enough time to build this LED Hat in time for Halloween this year but if you start now you should be finished by next year! It is hard to understand the complexity of this project without thinking about how it works for a few moments…

“Okay, so I bought an AVR STK500 programmer board for about £80 from http://uk.farnell.com, which comes with an ATmega16 and an ATmega8515-8PC microcontroller (not an AT90S8515-8PC as stated in the manual, but I only figured this out later). Just to be extravagant, I also bought an ATmega128, which has 64 pins so I had to buy an STK501, which costs more than the STK500 (about £95). This was from http://rswww.com; it hasn’t arrived yet, however.

It needs a serial RS232 port (AKA a COM port on PCs) to program it. These are a bit rare these days, so I thought I was going to have to buy a USB to RS232 adapter, which cost about £30, and seem hard to find in shops. If I did buy one, I’d want it also to work on Linux, and operate at the required 11280+ baud. Luckily however, I discovered that I do have a COM port on a windows box I have.

My friend (Martin) suggested that I might use a chain of shift-registers to shift out a given pattern to the LEDs quickly, pause for a while, then repeat. If this is done quickly enough, the shifting should be invisible. Presumably some sort of arrangement with latches could keep the LEDs isolated whilst the shifting happens if this proves to be a problem.”

 

 

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21 Comments


  1. Jesze, all that wire on a duel sided pcb! And the custom matrix must have been hard too.


  2. For this project, I would have paid extra for the PCB to be manufactured by a PCB fabber. Less point of failure.



  5. Wow great idea, but the “pcb” is a gordian knot. A led suit would be cool too 😀


  6. Absolutely. Positively. BRILLIANT. Incredible.







  13. alan,
    I don’t know if you can help at all – I have a neurological condition which affects my head movement and I’ve had this idea which might help me but being a non-tec person I don’t know how to go about it.
    Basically my idea is to fit a set of flashing leds into either the brim of a hat or the top part of a spectacle frame ( I wear glasses)something that is portable – so it would have to be battery powered.The moving lights would act as a partial distraction and hopefully reduce the head turning.
    Is there any chance of some guidance ‘cos you obviously have the knowledge and skills?
    Mike


  14. Realy nice and perfect work! awesome! xD i want it!


  15. I would recommend MCP23008 port expander from Microchip so you can control all LEDs more easily.



  17. Hi all! great hack, but someone can post the link of the full instructions to built it? Thanks alot to all!


  18. <Hey! I want to buy one of these1!!!!! Please tell me where!!!

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