Blinky Headgear

This hat has a chasing LED feature thanks to our old friend the 555 timer. [BananaSlug] even built in the option to change the speed at the push of a button.

His design starts out with a costume hat. Each of the 25 LEDs is soldered to a 2×4 hole chunk of protoboard. The LED package is pushed through a slit in the hat, but the protoboard remains on the inside where it can be sewn in place. From there [BananaSlug] soldered one negative bus around the circumference, and an individual positive lead from each module back to the control board. They’re addressed by a set of CD4017 decade counters which are clocked by the 555 timer circuit.

This is a great little analog/logic project and the style is perfect if you’ve got the coat to go along with it.

5 thoughts on “Blinky Headgear

  1. As someone who has literally just started building the circuitry for his LED hat on a solderless breadboard, I am sincerely impressed with your build! Thank you for sharing how you attached the LEDs as I have been worrying about that. Then again, I was thinking of a felt fedora for my hat, so not sure if the same technique will work for me. We’ll see!

    Also, kudos on the analogue circuit design (if 555 is not analogue, I apologise to all before the hate starts :P). I’m a wimp and relatively new to electronics so I shall be going the typical AVR microcontroller route, but it’s great to see someone else’s approach to the problem!

    In general, congrats on an awesome design!

  2. According to bannana slug’s profile and picture on instructable, the pronoun at the start f the 2nd paragraph should be HER.

    I don’t know how hackaday generates these write ups full of [username]. Auto replace every personal pronoun? Still needs an editor.

  3. As of yesterday I finally gave up on kiddie hacks and started to try to *understand* ICs, so I chose the 555 to take the beating.

    So this comes in, great timing, I follow the link, and

    Instructables PDFs are paywalled!!!

    Maybe I-m too nob to figure my way around, maybe they just want my email address (what for?!?! :-(
    anyway, not happy…

      1. well, yeah I guess. I mean, for a company selling the general public (I mean that, where the public *is* /the/ product to be marketed) gathering “live”, interest-connected emails makes sense.

        But for a site addressed to /hackers/? Do you think they can try to jam with the console cowboys of cyberspace, unscathed?

        The day is near when some kind of suitably proportioned payback will be given to those places built by crowdsourcing, that then abuse on the free and generous gift they received from their contributors. I might not be able to design such, but you’ll see me smiling from the side, and saying, “well done”.

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