The Musical Tesla Coil Hat

Lord Raiden would approve of this MIT’s student’s Mortal Kombat theme playing, lightning-spewing hat.

What was your Halloween costume this year? Actually, don’t bother answering that, MIT student Tyler Christensen’s was (almost) better. He made himself a Dual Resonant Solid State Tesla Coil (DRSSTC), attached it to a rather dapper hat, then had it play “Techno Syndrome” by the Immortals, colloquially known as the “awesome theme song from the first Mortal Kombat movie.”

Sadly, Christensen’s dream of becoming a cheesy-techno-and-lightning dispensing Halloween legend were crushed when the hat broke the day before Halloween. The video on the right is from the hat’s first live test run. Christensen has promised to return to the “hatcoil” project, once he’s finished with school work, sometime next February. In the meantime, you can check out his work in glorious technical detail here.

I bet this is exactly the kind of use old Nikola Tesla had in mind when he invented the alternating current.