The Wizard's Hat - A Tale Of Wizardry

How it all began

This is not your common story about someone building a cosplay outfit. This is not a story about someone making a copy of a movie prop. No this is much better. This is my story about combining hobbies and it includes wizards, witches, flying broomsticks, dragons and Trolls. But it also involves Arduino's, servomotors and funny sounds. This is my story about building a magic hat!

Ok, but why, you wonder? Let me explain. I love doing electronics and as my work got kind of side tracked, doing hands-on electronics less and less, I increased the numbers of hours wasted on hobby projects. Wasted or well spent? It all depends on the eye of the beholder! :-) So after work I like to spend my free time on my hobbies and family. The thing is, I have too many hobbies and I like them all! I learned the hard way that there are too few hours in a day to do all, so I decided to combine a few.  You see, my other passion is doing Judo. I've been a judo teacher for over 20 years and I love to teach young children. Let's call them Judo tumblers... To teach judo to this group of young children I camouflage my lessons into fairy tales. I step on the the judo floor, not as a teacher but as a wizard, a witch or even a pilot. They call me the Judo story maker. So, that's the title I have to live up to.

Now, most lessons are based on children's imagination. I use invisible broom sticks to fly on while wearing a invisible witch hat and the kids love it! So I decided to take this imagination to the next level by building a real wizard hat.

Inspired by the Sorting Hat as seen in a movie of the most famous kid wizard, I decided to build my own version. A functional one, with sounds and animatronics (eyes and mouth) .

The Challenge of the project

The challenge I find in this project is not the electronics but the hat it self! I have to build an actual hat! Never done that before......

The scope of the project

Specifications

• ESP32 based as those boards are very affordable
• SD card or similar to store sound files
• on boards speaker that can create enough volume
• maybe connect to external Bluetooth speaker
• OLED Display to mimic a human eye that blinks and moves around
• A Remote control to activate sounds
• 3 servo's for animatronics. ( mouth, eyebrow, general movement of hat)
• Nice leather of fabric to make it look old and wizards like.

Budget

The budget of this project is ongoing but as most parts can be bought online on site's like Aliexpress, I expect cost to be under €200.

Desired Result

A working hat on my head at the end of the project. It will have ways to play sounds that I can activate and it will have to meet the set specifications as close as possible.

Timeline

Although the timeline looks like I will design this project full time, let me assure you, that is not the case. The mentioned steps are timeslots that i can work on the project and in reality there might be a lot of time in between the steps that the project will just be resting on the shelf.  So this timeline is to give you some idea about the amount of work and the steps I have to follow before completion. 

How I think this will work:

Researching and Prototyping Electronics and Hardware 

Mechanical Parts Design

Breadboard first hardware setup using a first C code draft, PCB design

Assemble all electronics and animatronics

Programming

Build the actual hat, resulting in a project video for element14 presents

But then again....making plans and executing things don't always go in line....I might just update whenever and whatever I thing is needed.

Step 1: Research. Getting a jump start from previous designs

Step 2: Designing Mechanical Parts