Brimlight 1.0: Turn Your Hat Into a Headlamp!

Have you ever wanted to wear a headlamp and a ball cap at the same time, but the brim keeps getting in the way of the light beam? Have you ever lost your headlamp in the shadowy depths of your backpack? Are headlamps uncomfortable to you? Do you wanna be the coolest person around after the sun sets? Look no further!

This is the Brimlight, version 1.0. Integrate your lighting into the brim of your hat to turn it into a floodlight for great visibility in the dark,

In this Instructable, I'll talk through the general steps I took in Fusion to make this, but I'm not going to go super super detailed with exact details and things like that since every hat and every LED strip is a little bit different. The CAD part is aimed at people who are familiar with Fusion and would consider themselves an intermediate skill level.

I'll also include my 3D print files at the end of the CAD section if you'd like to give mine ago. It works on many of the hats I have, but there's no guarantee it'll be perfect for yours. Give it a try and see how it fits!

Let's go!

1. CAD Software (I use Autodesk Fusion)
2. 3D printer or 3D printing service
3. COB LED Strip (I used this one. There are also waterproof ones if that matters to you. I discovered thin ones like this a bit too late and I'll probably try those for my next version.)
4. USB cable (if you bought a fresh roll of LED strips, it may have a cable already included. If not, you can sacrifice an old Micro-USB to USB-A cable. In future versions, I want to use a right-angle cable.)
5. USB battery bank (I used this one, but it's probably a little bigger than necessary. Small banks tend to be pretty hard to find.)
6. Soldering Iron, wire strippers, solder, heat shrink tubing or electrical tape (If adding your own USB cable)
7. Zip ties or rubber bands

I chose to build up the brim of the hat first and then build my light attachment onto that. I did this by taking a photo of my hat with the brim pressed flat onto the table, uploading that as a canvas, and tracing over half of it in a sketch. Then, I extruded it up to the thickness of the hat.

To bend it, I learned about the sheet metal tools in Fusion. It still doesn't make too much sense to me if I'm being honest, but I added a sketch line slightly offset from the center and used that as the bend line. I originally had a canvas of a front view of the hat as a template, but in my many (many) prototype iterations, I ended up changing it many, many times.

You can mirror this now if you'd like to.

On the halfway plane, create the cross section of the Brimlight that we'll extrude. Here are some important things to think about:

1. You need a wider gap than the strip, as the strip will need to bend in on itself slightly at the front and it needs space to do so. Think about how if you try to bend a strip of paper like a rainbow, it'll start to try and crease in on itself. That's what happens here. I'm going to try and find some better solutions in the next version but that's what I've got for now.
2. No overhangs. As you can see in the image with the orange sliced 3d print file, that's what the print orientation will look like. If you have overhangs, the filament will sag and block the strips from sitting correctly in the slot.
3. I went about half an inch onto the brim. That ended up being a pretty good number.
4. Make sure your dimensions have pretty good tolerances. Too tight and you won't be able to get the LEDs in or get it on the hat, too loose and everything will just fall out.

Next, use the Sweep tool to extrude this profile along the edge of the brim. It helps to only do one half for now and then you can mirror it later. I added a twist angle to help keep it lined up with the brim all the way down.

Finally, create an offset plane and cut the body to length.

That's pretty much it on the CAD front.

I made two types of battery holder for my power bank. The left one is for hats that have a snapback or velcro tightening system in the back. The other is for hats that don't have that. It's meant to slot into the fold of the sweat band. This one worked alright, it needs some more work.

I designed them in this clamp style so you could slot the battery in and then use rubber bands or zip ties to tighten it down onto the battery.

I went through so many different iterations of this project to get it right. Getting the bend of the hat right and the fit for the LEDs right were the two most difficult elements, and it's STILL not perfect! If you're designing your own, don't be discouraged if it takes multiple attempts to get right. This is a really tricky project and we're trying to get LED strips to do stuff they don't want to do, so have some patience-- you'll get there!

It's time to print! If you'd like to use my files, here they are. Battery clip type a is the one featured in the image-- the snapback style. Type B is the other one for non-snapback hats.

When printing, you're gonna have to use supports. I simply don't see a way to make this project work well without. If you do, go for it. But the 3D printing community has become so obsessed about printing things without supports that we tend to forget that supports exist for a reason-- to make weird shapes like this one possible! If I were producing these at a massive scale, I'd probably put more effort into eliminating supports, but for a one-off, just use the supports. Definitely DON'T use auto generated supports though. In the Bambu slicer, I used paint-on supports with the sphere brush along the bottom edge. That's all that's necesary. I'd also recommend a brim on the Brimlight only as a couple of my iterations failed without it. My print took about 2.5 hours on my Bambu P1S.

One it's done printing, just snap off the supports and we're off to the races!

Do note that these files are in inches. Your slicer should detect this and change automatically, but if it seems super small, thats why :)

First, measure out your LED strip by kinda slotting it in a little bit and marking where you need to cut. Remember, with this type (and most other types) of LED strip, you need to cut on the black line in the middle of the copper pads.

First, we're gonna chop off the NON-USB-A side of the cable. DO NOT CUT OFF THE USB-A PORT. YOU NEED THAT ONE, YOU DO NOT NEED THE OTHER ONE. You can then use wire strippers to reveal the positive and negative cables and strip those to reveal the copper underneath. Be very careful-- these are usually super thin and very fragile.

Next, solder the two ends to the LED strip. Red is usually positive and black or blue is usually negative. If you've never soldered to an LED strip before, this video is a fantastic guide, but the gist of it is to melt some solder onto the wires and a couple blobs onto the strip, then you use the iron to push them together. Just watch the video, it explains it way better than I can lol

Finally, test out the strip and then wrap it with electrical wire or heat shrink tubing!

To insert the LED, you just kinda have to mess around with it for a bit. I had success fitting the bottom edge in as best I could and then using a card to jam in the top. As mentioned before, we're trying to bend the LED strip like a rainbow, which it doesn't really like, so it will clump up a bit. This print still isn't the most perfect fit, but it's pretty close. Just keep poking at it until you're happy. You may try to use some glue somewhere to hold it in place, but so long as you're not super rough with it, it should be alright. I tried super glue and that didn't work, but hot glue would probably do the trick.

To use the snapback battery clip, simply hold them in place, slot the battery in, and use rubber bands or zip ties to clamp it down.

Route the cable from the front to the battery bank. I bundled it up a bit and taped it to the inisde of the sweat band and it's barely noticable.

That's it! Now, you can take on the dangers of the night with confidence and coolness!

This project is still ultimately a prototype and I plan on continuing to work on it! Here are some things I want to improve:

1. Fitment of the LED strip still isnt as good as I'd like. I discovered those thinner COB strips while writing this Instructable, and those seem great so I'm going to try that out. I'm wondering if I can make it in two parts so you stick the strips in one part and then there's a cover or something to lock it in and cover up the PCB.
2. The battery bank is a little bulky and heavy. There's definitely some smaller and lighter ones out there, so I'll look a little harder at some other options. I also want to use a right angle USB cable to make it a little cleaner. I could also experiment with small rechargable lithium batteries, which I've never done before.
3. If I integrated a battery like that, that would make making the whole system waterproof a bit more feasible and that would be pretty cool.
4. I'd like to add manual controls like an on/off switch and dimmer to control the brightness. Right now, you literally just plug/unplug the light into the battery bank and that's not very practical.
5. There are some 12v COB strips, which would probably make it even brighter, but powering that seems tricky.
6. Portability isn't great right now, if you don't want to leave it on your hat it's a weird shape that's awkward to store. It'd be cool to make it fold down to a nicer shape for storage somehow.

If you make this project, wether using my files or doing it yourself, I'd love to see it and hear what you think! If you're just reading and you have an idea on how I could improve it, please let me know!