If you’ve ever played Hungry Hungry Hippos, that’s what you’ll think about when you see these hippo head costumes by Instructables user slohcooker. They made the creature heads for a giant version of Hungry Hungry Hippos in Seattle and designed them so that they could be constructed using materials from Home Depot and few tools. In order to get the scale right, they made a smaller model using pipe cleaners. Then they scaled it up to make it from PVC pipes and connectors to make the heads Tinker Toy style. For the skin, they used plastic tablecloths:
Take one of the plastic tablecloths and hold it up to the side of your hippo skeleton. That friend of yours will come in handy again here. Using a marker, trace the outside outline of the hippo with an additional 2 inches offset. Then stack another tablecloth under this one and carefully cut out both of the side panels at the same time, cutting with an additional 2 inches outside the marker line.
Now take the 3rd tablecloth and drape it over the top of the hippo, starting at the floor at the nose-end and going toward the back. It won’t cover all the way to the bottom of the back — this is intentional. You’ll be left with an open doorway in the back of the hippo head. Trace the outline of the edges with a marker just like you did with the side. No cutting on this one. The 54″ wide tablecloth should be exactly the right side for this design.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
