I remember having a crazy baseball hat with silver wings back when I was a kid. People used to call me the FTD florist when I wore it, even though I didn’t have any flowers. Anyway, you can imagine how I was laughing to see this top hat with a far better version of wings on Makers. It was created by Tom Van den Bon for South Africa’s recent Market Hack to honor the sponsor Red Bull. You know they are all about the wings.

Each hat is hiding a 3D printed bracket inside with a pair of batteries and two small motors. The motors are attached to the wings (also 3D printed) which will flap up and down at random intervals as you walk around.

I was actually thinking it would be cool to cut up some colorful Red Bull Cans or use the tabs as feathers to create the wings for the next version. You can riff of this design as Tom was good enough to make the project open source—check out his Github for the code and 3d print files. The main components are an Arduino Pro Mini and two micro servos, which we’ve got. So, if you fancy yourself a wing lover, this project may be for you. Of course we also have a learning guide for a cool Animatronic Tail, too. What will it be—heads or tails?

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!