So, the 2007 - 2008 Academic Year came and went, and similar to last year, I was put in charge of the Convocation Ceremony for the College of Engineering.
I find graduation ceremonies dreadfully boring, and since I am required to attend 4 of them every year (2 engineering, 1 graduate, and 1 school wide), I figure that if I'm going to be put in charge one, we might as well have a little fun. So this year I decided to go all out, and spent 5 months of my spare time here and there working on:
The LED Graduation Cap
It uses 64 tri-color LEDs (16 to a side) that are fully programmable through the use of a PIC microcontroller and LED shift register drivers with PWM control for color blending. It can draw up to 2 A of current if the hat blasts light in all of its glory (although it is currently limited to 1 A), so I had to use an external battery pack using a 9.6 V, 4.2 AHr NiMH battery that is voltage regulated down to 5V to ensure a long running time. I designed the circuit and the developed the program for the PIC microcontroller, while my technician Ron Hunt designed and milled a printed circuit board using TraxMaker, populated the board, and developed the power supply module. Since we milled out the PCB, we were limited to a 2-sided board, which meant some jumpers were required since there are 192 traces that feed the 64 LEDs.
Time was tight by the end of the project (as always), but I am pleased to say that there were no errors in the design of the circuit and my technician did an outstanding job with the circuit board. Except for a via connection that he forgot to solder (which was quickly remedied), I was ecstatic to see that the PCB fired up correctly the first time we applied power to it. While I worked on getting the board into a graduation cap the evening before the ceremony, Ron worked on an external power supply project box that contained the voltage regulated battery pack and connected to the cap with a CAT-5 cable and RJ-45 connector. The battery pack clipped onto my belt and contained a power switch, a 4 A fuse, a couple of push buttons (a master reset and a debounced button for manual blinking of the lights), a second toggle switch to flip between automated and manual control, and an LED indicator light that fades as the voltage drops across the 9.6 V battery pack. After three intense weeks of work at the end of the semester, the hat was complete by 11:30 p.m. the night before the ceremony.
To spice things up a bit during the convocation, I choreographed the entire ceremony to music, inserted jokes, and generally was irreverent to engineers everywhere. Before giving my introductory remarks, I settled upon one particular song to set the tone for the day. By the time it was all over, one of my students had already uploaded the last 40 seconds of the introduction to YouTube:
My wife was also able to capture a fuller clip of the proceedings:
The ceremony, and especially the Graduation Cap, ticked off some of the other professors something fierce, but the students loved it, the parents loved it, President Welty loved it, and my wife thought I was a geek, so I'm sure the LED Graduation Cap will make a repeat performance next year if I am ever allowed to do it again. I figure that I'll now end up doing the Engineering Convocation at Fresno State for the next 20 years, or will be banned from it forever.
Either way, at least I didn't fall asleep this year.
