(Credit: TI) -At TI, we celebrate the makers and hobbyists who enjoy creating and innovating on their own time. In our ongoing DIY with TI series, we share their incredible Do It Yourself inventions using TI technology.

Need a project to prevent boredom and bring a smile to your friends’ faces this summer? Why not fashion your own “smart hat” that lights up, displays messages for your audience, and shows you how well your Facebook and Twitter posts are being received.

The now-famous, do-it-yourself Smart Hat serves as a creative platform for LED lighting technologies and social media messaging. It uses both TI embedded and analog parts, including several of our LED drivers and a SimpleLink™ Wi-Fi^® CC3200 wireless MCU, which interacts with the cloud to communicate with others.

“We know that social interaction is very important, and now that we have embedded microcontrollers that can talk through those same social channels, we thought it would be interesting to understand what type of conversations are happening in the cloud,” said Adrian Fernandez, manager of TI’s LaunchPad Development Ecosystem.

While Adrian is generally a happy guy, the open-source Smart Hat displays an ever-changing range of emotions. Green lights mean people are sending happy messages; red lights mean sad messages.

“Using the sentiment analysis tool, we are able to determine whether people were primarily happy that day or sad that day,” Adrian said smiling.

Adrian originally worked with several other TIers to deck out the hat for a Maker Faire in 2014. The hat belongs to Lee Goldberg, an editor at EDN magazine, who loans it to us for events like the “DIY with TI” Showcase Event in May.

Learn more about the hat and how it makes Adrian happy in this video:

- Think. Innovate. contributor -