Tutorial: DIY Star Crown Hedy Lamarr Cosplay – Fun Beginner Project
Check out the latest Learn Guide from Erin St Blaine: Make a star crown inspired by the headdress worn by Hedy Lamarr in Zeitgeist Girl (1941). This is a fantastic beginner project that requires a little soldering and some crafting skills, but no coding at all. Learn to install WLED on a microcontroller and hook up Adafruit’s new star-shaped NeoPixels. The crown is made from an inexpensive headband with zip ties for the spokes.
Sparkle like a 1940s starlet with this DIY star crown, inspired by the iconic Hedy Lamarr in Ziegfeld Girl (1941).
Hedy Lamarr wasn’t just another Hollywood beauty—she was also a fearless inventor, and wicked smart. While making headlines with her glamorous and sometimes scandalous roles (like in Ecstasy, where she became famous for one of Hollywood’s earliest nude scenes), Hedy was secretly working on a groundbreaking invention to help win World War II. She co-created a “frequency hopping” system to keep Allied torpedoes safe from jamming. That tech became the foundation for what we now use in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
In this tutorial, we’ll channel that mix of glam and genius to make a modern, glowing star crown with NeoPixel stars and WLED, perfect for cosplaying the timeless Hedy or adding some sparkle to your next event. Let’s dive into some Old Hollywood glam meets high-tech magic.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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 and our Discord!
