For this week’s project the assignment was to hack a toy or some other piece of consumer electronics. I decided to incorporate an X10 wireless home automation remote control into this trucker hat (which I bought from a homeless guy at SXSW for $2). The idea came from wanting to do something with the gesture of tipping the hat — so I put soft switches on the corners of the bill; when you squeeze the bill you can turn on (or off) whatever device is plugged into the wireless transceiver.

There wasn’t a whole lot of hacking involved — basically soldering some magnet wire to the contacts of the switches in the remote. I created some simple soft-switches with conductive fabric and a leather barrier between each piece, et voila.