This project is a piece of wearable technology created with Arduino and an 8×8 LED matrix by Annelie Koller and Niki Selken and was featured on Adafruit's Blog. In our quest to program two 8×8 LED matrixes, we wanted to create a piece of wearable tech with blinking eyes. First we thought of glasses that blinked, but after visiting the discount store to buy the glasses, we found this hat and settled on making a Sock Monkey hat with blinking eyes. Below is our first prototype.

Blinking monkey prototype 1 from niki selken on Vimeo.

Our major hurdle was getting the eyes to blink at the same time. We eventually had to add in the delays to make that work. We then embedded the Arduino and breadboard into the hat with a battery pack attached. You can check out the code on Github.

Built with Arduino.