If you are a graduate then chances are you should be familiar with the graduate cap which is part of the traditional graduation garments along with the robe and the scroll. Depending on the policy of the school you go to, these caps are generally not meant to be decorated in any way whatsoever and unlike the movies/television shows where the ending credits show everyone tossing their caps into the sky, the throwing of caps is usually discouraged, some times because the graduation gowns are rented and they don’t want them damaged or soiled.

Victor, a graduating student, was disappointed that the rest of his graduating class weren’t allowed to decorate their caps and in an act of technological defiance, he decided he would try to sneakily decorate his cap without anyone noticing, or at least until they watched the graduating video.

He adorned the corners of the cap and the top of cap with infrared LEDs that blinked in morse code – “Congratulations class of 2011!” Not sure how many people actually know how to read morse code but we’re guessing the ones that do will be appreciating his sentiments. The sneaky part was that the light the infrared LEDs emit is actually unable to be seen by the human eye but will actually show up on camera.

Here’s his account on how he did it, for more photos and the video head on down to his RazorConcept’s page:

An ATmega168 in dead-bug style controls the whole thing. A single sell lithium polymer battery provides the power – it’s an unregulated 4.2 volts, not ideal but it was lightweight, flat, and worked well enough.

I coded the mega168 in Arduino. The beauty of it is that it took me about 1 minute to code the thing. I downloaded the morse library, and changed the example sketch to blink out my phrase. That’s it, done. Load atmega168 into an arduino board, press upload, and it’s in!

One problem I encountered was that in dead-bug format, the atmega should use its internal oscillator at 8mhz instead of an external crystal. To fix this, I hooked up my AVR ISP MKII programmer and used AVR Studio 4 to change the fuses to make the mega use its internal oscillator.

After that, it was a simple job of wiring up the LEDs and putting them in the hat.

Filed in Design >Gadgets..

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