Graduation Mortar Board

Update 1: My mortar board is featured on Arduino website!!

Update 2: Checkout the instructables I put together.

A week before my convocation I thought I can’t attend without decorating my mortar board. As I didn’t have much time, lots of my idea wasn’t plausible. I knew I won’t be able to pull off any fancy idea.

I’m a huge fan of Sci-Fi genre. Movies, games, novels, you name it, I love it. The Matrix was one of my favorite movies of all time. I watched it countless times. There was a monologue in the movie, which I thought, goes with graduation ceremony really well.

This is what I came up with:

But I wasn’t 100% satisfied. I felt like it won’t be complete if I don’t use any electronics. So I added LEDs:

But not just any LEDs.

I used Adafruit’s Neopixel Ring LEDs. It uses only one pin to communicate, which is handy.I used an Arduino mini Pro (3.3V - 8MHz) from sparkfun to program the animation. 3.3V/8MHz version was used to reduce the current consumption, which in turn makes my lithium ion battery (3.7V) lasts longer. Everything was placed inside the cap. I also placed a slide switch between my battery and board/LED so that I can turn it ON/OFF conveniently.

The code is available here.