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Enchanted Witches Hat

A simple way to add a little animatronic personality to a Halloween costume.

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When my daughter was a witch for Halloween, she wanted her costume to stand out a little from the other witches out there. To do this, we added a little magic to her costume by attaching Adafruit Sewable NeoPixels to her cloak for lighting effects and added a little animation to her hat using a cheap Towerpro SG90 servo.

Between the two enhancements, it was the hat that received the most amount of comments, so I wanted to share it as a quick and easy enhancement to your childs Halloween costume.

  • 1 × Espruino Microcontroller
  • 1 × 90g Servo

  • 1
    Extend the servo horn

    In order to get the amount of throw needed to wiggle the hat, I needed to extend the length of the servo horn. I did this by quickly molding some thermal-morph plastic to the horn. You'll see that as the very roughly formed red extension attached to the horn in the pictures below.

  • 2
    Create the servo harness

    To attach the servo to the hat, I cut a small strip of plastic canvas, which is available at any craft store.

    Then I cut a rectangular hole for the servo and held it in place with a little hot glue.

    Finally, on each end of the plastic canvas, I attached a strip of self-adhesive Velcro. The other half of the Velcro was attached inside the hat. (pictured below)

  • 3
    Attach the servo harness to the hat

    I attached the servo harness by turning the hat inside-out and adhering the self-adhesive Velcro strips about 2/3rds the way up the hat. Then I attach the horn of the servo to the hat using a safety pin.

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Mike Szczys wrote 08/14/2020 at 16:40 point

It's a simple mechanism, but the movement of the hat is really lifelike. Nice!

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Robotic Theater wrote 08/17/2020 at 20:44 point

Thank you!

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