There once was a time of carelessness. Remember when you would craft a programmable IoT hat 🧢 with an e-ink display running linux and sshd so people could play with it? Let me explain:

Crafting

• Raspberry Pi Zero W

• 2.13" e-ink display

• Baseball cap (or fedora, for that extra linux kernel config look 🐧)

• Power bank & USB cable

I settled on cutting a GPIO header-sized hole in the front where the display would go and stacked everything together. I already had the SDK and a bunch of custom scripts to display text in different fonts and dithered images. The only thing left was to setup SSH so people could log into the hat. Perfectly normal thing to do, right?

Party time!

I went to my friend’s birthday party and people were like: What do you mean, log into your hat?

They installed SSH clients on their phones, set up connection profiles and logged in. I taught them about basic unix commands and the different scripts in the home directory I had prepared.

At some point, 5 people where logged into my hat simultaneously. I invite you to go back and read that sentence again. I showed them mesg and write so we had a free chat room, too.

Long story short, whoever wore the hat became a walking meme/legend.

I loved how my friends learned about SSH and tinkering with python scripts because of a hat. Some even scp-ed custom images to display.

Shortly after I took it to a proper dance party for a stress test, but I’ll have to add lasers, AirDrop and an in-hat battery pack for proper attention and usability.

In retrospect, I can not believe how absolutely ridiculous this project was, but I learned a lot, we laughed a lot and I’m very proud of it.

A year later, well into lockdown, I got into 3D printing.

Like, I really got into 3D printing. l’ll tell you about that in another post.