With graduation season in full force, Western Carolina University engineering student Michael King wanted to be sure his friends and family could spot him in the crowd on his big day. Whereas most graduates would choose glue and glitter to decorate their caps, he wanted to do something a little different. Naturally, he decided to embed his mortarboard with a 32×32 LED matrix, an Arduino Mega (ATmega2560), three SPDT switches, a 2000mAh lithium-ion battery, some wire, and lots of code.
“I used three SPDT switches — one for LED grid power, one for Arduino power, and another to break out of the loop and display a static ‘WCU’ logo. LED grid is powered via a 3.7V li-ion battery. 9V battery to power the Arduino Mega,” King writes.
The result was perhaps one of the coolest graduation accessories we’ve ever seen, capable of displaying a wide range of animated graphics like Mario, Pac-Man, and even a “Hire Me Google” message.
Bringing this idea to fruition called for plenty of Arduino code, which allowed him to convert bitmaps to arrays. According to the Maker, he “had script written in Processing that could read a 32×32 pixel image, parse and convert it into an array of hex values, and literally format/write it out to a header file that I could just copy and paste into Arduino IDE.”
As if the cap wasn’t awesome enough, King says that he’s working on programming a playable version of pong. You can see it all in action below, and check out more of his project here.