What is it? A connected Santa Claus hat!

What is it called? Le ProtoBonnet!

Why? This hat has been created entirely for the Noël des protopotes a special livestream event that happened on the 27th of December, 2021.

Kathleen and Alain, the two hosts of the event!

Prototyping time…

But, why?

For their first collaboration, Les protopotes decided to organised a christmas twitch stream. The live is hosted by Neodyme and Kathleen (aka Daddy and Mommy Christmas) from Switzerland. The goal was to create 6 connected costume parts that could interact with the live and people in the chat.

I was part of the team making Kathleen’s hat, along with Tix le Geek and Hippo.

We had the idea to create a hat with two eyes and white fabric in orter to change its color while reacting to events, and also launch two quizzes directly on twitch.

I was personnally charged to sew the hat, make the electronics and program it in order for it to react to MQTT messages.

Viewers can trigger actions and commands through a dedicated web interface in exchange of protopoints (currency created for the event that can be obtained in exchange of Twitch channel points).

Different faces

With two beautiful eyes and a “body” full of RGB LEDs, the hat had the perfect equipment to have multiple expressions!

Iddle mode

Default state, a slow gliding rainbow and simple blinking eyes.

Love mode

People were able to send love to the hat, it reacts accordingly by showing love too!

Angry face

A special face that was triggered only when a particular Twitch emote was used in the chat! Eyes frowned and animation went in fire!

Sleep mode

Like humans, hats get bored too. When nobody triggered a special command for the hat during a certain amount of time, it fell asleep waiting to be awakened again later.

RGB Quizz

Quiz time: a random color was chosen and appeared on the hat, the viewers had to choose a value from 0 to 360 according to what they thought the color displayed. The closest person was winning Protopoints!

Shitty Flute Quizz

Another quiz for the viewers: a famous song was played in a shitty flute version and people had to find the name of the song to make it stop! In order for the hat to be as horrible as the sound, the hat had a full stroboscopic effect at full brightness.

Want to know more?

You can find the code on github or you can still watch the replay of the stream on youtube!