During my last summer internship, a thought popped into my head. I realized that it wouldn’t be too hard to stick an LED matrix under my graduation cap, to have one that would be totally unique. Well, it turns out someone beat me to the punch, but I could still make one that was totally unique by stealing ideas from other places too. Reddit’s r/place was really cool. I figured I could recreate that on a 32x32 board.
My original idea was to just order an LED matrix, hook it up to an ESP8266, and broadcast a Wi-Fi hotspot. Then, if anyone connected to the hotspot, they would be redirected to a page where they could place pixels on my graduation cap. I ultimately decided against broadcasting my own hotspot and redirecting people, because that seemed more prone to not working well.
I instead bought a Raspberry Pi Zero W and had it connect to a mobile hotspot broadcast from my phone. It was hooked up to an LED Matrix, and both were powered from a USB battery pack.
I disassembled my graduation cap, and cut out a square in the cardboard mortar board to put the LED Matrix into, to try to keep the cap flatter. Next, I wired the Pi Zero W to the LED Matrix, and I wired the LED Matrix to a Micro USB breakout board in order to power it. The bottom ended up looking like this:
Once it was all wired up, I set up hzeller’s LED Matrix library on the Pi, and ran one of the demos. The ribbon cable that came with the matrix didn’t solder well, so it had some bad connections, so I ended up de-soldering it and soldering on individual jumper wires, but once that was done, I was met with this:
I was really happy. On the software side, I wrote a little web app in python and cherrypy. It has a little javascript front end and sends clicks to the server. The clients, both for the pi and for the website, use long polling to receive changes to the grid. I won’t share the URL, because I don’t plan on keeping it, but I also won’t crop the URL out of the screenshot below. Plus, the URL is hardcoded into the code on GitHub, so I can’t really stop anyone from finding the site. Just know that I do not endorse anyone visiting it, as odds are I will not control the domain in the future. Anyways, here’s that screenshot I mentioned:
That screenshot is a little outdated, and it might have packed more punch to show what that screenshot looks like on the cap, but chronologically, next I put the fabric over the LED Matrix, making it look like this:
Next I had to add the tassel, and I also wanted some more fun things on the cap. I noticed the library came with a game of life demo, which saved me from coding my own. I did alter their code slightly, and kept track of how long each cell was alive, and then showed each cell in a different color based off how old it was. It went something like this:
After that, I hot glued the cap back together and shared the link to the r/place clone that controlled my cap with my friends and classmates. I had some sense to not let them touch it during the main commencement ceremony, as that was big and formal. Instead, during commencement the hat displayed a static ND logo. But once I left the stadium I switched the hat to show live updates of the r/place clone. Shortly before my diploma ceremony, it looked like this:
Not sure how I feel about the big Michigan logo, but it was promptly replaced with an ND logo, so that was good. The hat survived all day, with the battery lasting with 3 out of 4 bars left. The hat survived the rain, which really worried me. I consider this project a success, but don’t really know what to do with the cap. For now I guess it’ll stay intact.