Christmas Tree Light Project

thingiverse

Little Christmas Tree LED Project that uses WS2812 style LED lights connected to an Arduino Pro Micro or Mini, or any you like. Printed in clear PLA, 40m/s and uses A LOT of hot glue!!! Rough Instructions: 1. Print Christmas Tree Front 2. While printing take 17 LED lights of your choice, split them if required and then solder back together using short lengths of wire (2cm or less). Fiddly work, I used very bendy cheap wire which makes installation easier. Finally solder a longer wire onto the bottom LED input, use a connector of your choice if you like. 3. Print the other three parts 4. Use hot glue to mount the LED into the tree front piece. There are square indents for the WS2812's, but this is Version 1 and you will find that not all will work. I glued them in through the front holes first, then I filled the case with hot glue to make it permanent...TEST before you do this! 5. Find a 5 volt power connector of some kind, I used an old USB Type 1 connector I had laying around. 6. Grab the Arduino and install a sketch of your choice. I am using the Example sketch called "ColorPallette" from the "FastLED" library in the GIF shown. Don't forget to change the number of LED's to 17 and the pin to the pin you want to use, the default 5 should work, I used 4. 7. Put the tree back onto the front and hot glue liberally, use a heavy object to marry the two pieces properly. 8. Thread the LED wires into the base and then push the tree into the base. 9. Connect the LED data line to your chosen PIN. 10. Connect the +5v from the power connector to the Arduino VCC AND to the LED +5v. Don't power the LED's through the Arduino, I don't think it would work. 11. Connect the ground to both the Arduino and the LED strip. 12. Test it work 13. Squeeze all the guts into the base, the big slot is so you can access the Pro Mini pins to upload new sketches. 14. Hot glue or use blue tack to press the base bottom onto the base. 15. Enjoy! https://imgur.com/rblQfCI Follow me on Twitter @H0mewater to see my other projects!