Bartholomew was born out of boredom. He was born out of a lot of free time and me wanting to do something with it. It all started with me looking at a stack of parts and wanting to do something fun for the winter break.
I had a santa hat from a costume and looked at it and thought that would make a great platform to expand and wondered what it would say if it was able to talk.
I started by assigning goals.
- It needs to talk.
- It needs to look cute.
- It needs to be comfortable to wear.
- I need to have the components.
With this, I started designing my hat.
I started off by making a demo system using a raspberry pi, a speaker, a two servos and a power bank.
Since I was able to control everything using a demo program, I continued to modify the current program to get the functionality I wanted. The servos were used to move the mouth and animate the tip of the hat itself.
Once I had that somewhat working, I began working on the aesthetic of the hat itself. I made a slit through the middle of it to create an opening for a mouth. To give the appearance of lips, I sewed on cotton on the edge of the cut.
To house all the components inside, I created a cardbord frame out of a cereal box and created a live hinge reenforced with tape for the mouth. I used an allen key connected to pne of the servos and created a matching slot in the mouth to allow the servo to lift and close the mouth easily to make it appear like it talks. I also placed the other servo in the top with a pen connected to its tip to allow it to wag the top of the hat to provide some emotion to the hat. I taped in a powerbank, speaker and a raspberry pi to the inside of the hat to secure all the components in place.
In the end, I routed a button to the side of the hat to allow me to activate a random sound clip from the folder.
The result was an entertaining hat that quoted movies and looked cute while doing it.