Autumn 2003
ARCH 498z, Physical Computing
Taught by Ken Camarata

This was a project in a physical computing class in which I participated. The theme of the class was to create a toy. I thought that it would be interesting to capitalize on children's fascination with magic and the idea for the Magic Top Hat was born.

The Magic Top Hat is a talking top hat that currently plays a riddle game and allows children to cast spells. The riddle game starts with the top hat giving a riddle to a child. The child has to find the object that is the answer to the riddle. Once the child has found the object, he/she places the object in the top hat and the top hat says whether the riddle was answered correctly or not. Children responds to the top hat by tapping the top hat with a wand.

Children can cast spells by tapping the patches on the brim of the hat in different combinations. Spells that are casted correctly result in different effects (currently displayed on a computer monitor).

The Magic Top Hat was implemented using the following components:

• a HandyBoard for getting magnetic reed switch output
• an RFID reader for recognizing tagged objects.
• Java Speech API for the text-to-speech capabilities
• Java Communications API to communicate serially with the RFID reader and HandyBoard

Click here for the diagram of the Magic Top Hat.