A lightweight light hat.

At Burning Man, it's easy to get separated from friends at night.

And there's essentially no cell signal. A best practice to avoid losing your friends in big crowds is to establish some sort of checkpoint system among the group before venturing out. My camp's system, centered around the idea of providing temporary "base services" to one another, was so successful it became our camp name. But checkpointing involves some administration costs and if it fails, reconnecting is unlikely. 

When people are trying to meet, they perform visual searches constantly. And when searching through a large dense population, a unique pattern of lights fixed above the target is a great help! Think of The Sims' floating green diamond. 

An EL headdress will turn you into a beacon of reunification.

2018 Update

Using EL ribbon this time, again from coolneon.com. The sales guy who helped me, "G", was the best. Answered all my questions in the most pleasant, patient way. 

Going for some natural-ish bounce and wave in the ribbon. I'm really liking the weave pattern, but it does eat up some precious length reducing bounciness. It's also angled upwards on my head, making it a bit difficult to see from eye-level. Final design TBD...

Materials:

Lights

• Big Boy Classic EL wire driver
• EL wire
  • Amazon or Coolneon.com "high bright" wire
  • Use at least 15 ft (aim for 20-40'!)
• Y-Connectors / quad-connectors / extensions
  • The driver outputs to a single connector. If using multiple colors / strands of wire, you'll need to fork that connector. Multiple forks is okay.
  • Get a few for cable routing flexibility.
• Battery cage
  • Holds 8 AA's and outputs via 9V snap to driver.
  • Battery life for ~30 feet of wire was ~10 hrs this year.
    • Note the inverse relationship between wire length and battery life.  
• Batteries
  • Always carry enough batteries for a full replenishment! 
    • A single 9V will work in a pinch to get you back to camp.
    • Consider using rechargeable batteries.

Assembly

Buy and inflate air tubes

InflatablePackaging.com sells sheets of inflatable ribbed plastic pillows, used to wrap fragile goods during shipping, under the brand name Superi-Air. Cutting between the ribs yields individual tubes. 

Available in any permutation of:
Lengths of 12”, 24”, 36”, and 48”
Widths of 0.75”, 1”, 1.50”, and 2” (after inflation). Note that it ships uninflated.  
The online store is limited to the four lengths in only 1” and 2” widths. Super-Air is the item in the top row, third-from-left with the text 'Price per 24" Long'.
You'll need to email them to buy an unlisted permutation. I recommend ordering a bunch of combos for a failure/experimentation buffer. They're pretty inexpensive.

Add armor

T-T-Tape the base

Arrange base tubes into a square and tape together

Some things to think about here:

1. The battery pack should be mounted on the front or back tube to keep in line with your center of gravity. 
2. Arrange so that the left and right tubes rest on top of the front and/or back tube. This forms a cavity for the battery pack to rest.
3. Consider making the hat reversible.

I ripped my gorilla tape down the middle to make two narrower strips, and made long X patterns with these at each intersection corner. 
Start by making a right angle with two tubes. Do this in front of a mirror and recalibrate with each tube addition. 
You want it snug, but too-tight will make your head sore after a few hours.
In 2017 I made it too tight and my head ached the first night. I re-taped the next day and was comfortable the rest of the week.

Tube architecture

Make something fancy. Some things I drew inspiration from:

1. Anime hair
2. Balloon hats (very similar idea!)
3. Insect eyes
4. This girl's mohawk and armor

If connecting two clear tubes, consider using clear Gorilla tape or packing tape to avoid obscuring your EL glow.
I did a bad job with my packing tape joints and a few came apart during the week (fixed with duct tape). I'll only use clear Gorilla tape going forward.

Add Electroluminescence

EL Tape / Ribbon

While this hat used EL wire, EL tape/ribbon is super cool and worth considering. Though it only glows from one side (and thus reduces that nice diffuse glow through the transparent tube), it is much brighter than EL wire. I played with the idea of using EL tape to make long strips of hair, but decided against it and used the ribbon to make a light sword.

EL Wire

Things to think about when attaching:

1. Symmetry, in shape and color.
2. Play with the density of light.
3. Plan wire routing -- all plugs merging on one side is convenient, but not necessary with cable extenders.

Attachment methods:

1. Wrap the wire taut around the tube in a candy cane pattern, and tape only the ends of the wire in place.
   1. Try different densities of coil wrap.
2. Tape all the wire onto the tube with transparent tape.
   1. Non-candy cane patterns possible.
3. (Super)glue the wire on.
4. Hot glue the wire on -- definitely add gorilla-tape armor before hot-gluing, as direct hot glue might melt the plastic. Though I hear there's low temp hot glue?

Driver and Battery Cage

STOP: Do not connect the driver to battery power without sufficient EL wire attached!
This can damage the driver. For example, my driver requires a minimum of 20 ft. Check yours.

Mounting the battery on the back tube felt slightly more balanced for me than the front tube, but I wore the hat both ways pretty comfortably.
Place your driver before your battery. Exact location will depend on your cable routing.
You will want your driver's 9V snap to be within easy reach of the battery cage's 9V snap. This connection is your on-off switch.
Orient your battery cage with its +/- 9V snap aligned to the driver's snap -- ie. easy positive-to-negative snapping.

Do final wire routing to connect the driver output plug to your merged EL wire plug.
I taped my driver on a side tube, with its 9V snap emanating towards the battery cage in back and merged EL plug in front.

Pro-tip story: At one point in the week I picked up the headdress when getting ready and noticed that the driver was squealing and very hot, despite being unlit. I noticed that one of the driver's 9V snaps was resting against one/two of the battery 9V snaps and making some sort of bad electric mojo. I cringe knowing this was happening for 12+ hours. The driver worked fine afterwards, but I became careful about disconnecting the driver's 9V snap and wedging it solidly apart from the battery cage.

The 48" (4ft) long tubes are a bit unwieldy for a hat but more suitable for wings or a sword.
The 2" wide tubes are super thick and difficult to bend. 

Post-mortem

Good

1. Lots of questions and convos and requests to wear it! The best part.
2. Had tape and backup tubes for on-playa repairs. Only had to use the tape.
3. No electronics failures.
4. Never stranded without batteries.

Bad

1. One of my 0.75" width tubes ruptured late in the week, but the helix of shaped EL wire held it suspended and mostly full of air. I actually didn't notice until the drive home.
2. The hat wings began skewing over the course of the week. I think it was because the 'wings' were not at perfect orthogonals to the base.
3. Each EL wire strand was 1 meter long, except for one 3 meter length of white. I had to bridge this across the hat (visible in skew pic above), and this little bridge section got bent and stopped glowing. 
4. Packing tape was a bad call. All Gorilla tape going forward. 
5. Initially made the base uncomfortably tight.

Next Visit

1. Brighter light. One of these:
   1. High-bright EL wire
   2. EL tape
   3. Addressable LEDs
   4. LED backlit panels
2. Look into using a more exotic battery type 
3. Make something more helmet-y like this incredible Daft Punk helmet.