Stand Out at Graduation With A GIF-Enabled Cap

When graduating from high school or college, decorating caps is generally frowned upon. On the other hand, enforcement is difficult, so creative artisans and hackers have come up with their own ways to make themselves stand out from the crowd: glitter, rhinestones, fabric, paint… or in this case, LEDs.

That’s because Maker “Aleks B” recently decided to take things to an extreme for his commencement ceremony, embedding a 32x32 LED matrix between the square piece cardboard and cloth covering on top of his cap.

Control was provided by a Teensy 3.2 development board and an Adafruit SmartMatrix Shield, allowing him to play GIFs off an SD card. A hole on the inside of the cap also enabled him to run a barely noticeable USB cable down his neck to a 2000mAh battery bank hidden his pocket, which could supply power for five or so hours — plenty of time for the ceremony!

Results were, of course, spectacular and no withheld diploma was reported in the project’s build log!

[h/t: Reddit]