Light Up Your Limbs

Here’s a Christmas tree project we can get behind. The “tree” itself is made of twisted pairs of insulated copper wire.  At the end of each pair a surface mount LED has been soldered between the two conductors.  All of the wire limbs converge into a 4×4 matrix. One tree uses a prototyping shield and an Arduino, the other tree is just using an ATtiny2313 microprocessor. Take a look at the twinkling tree in the video after the break.

This artful creation uses one color of LEDs.  We’d love to see future improvements that incorporate multiple colors, enhance the fading effects, and perhaps add some interactivity such as pulsing to an inspiring rendition of Chestnuts Roasting on and Open Fire (which, consequently, is called “The Christmas Song“).

[flickr video=4186740171]

12 thoughts on “Light Up Your Limbs

  1. Could use an led on each port pin and run a Fast Fourier Transform on a mic input attached to an A/D pin. Reasonably easy to implement but whether it’d be worth the effort for such a fun silly project is another thing.

  2. Cool. If you want even more LED’s in the next iteration you could look into playing with charlieplexing this is a little more complex than multiplexing (but not much) and will let you for example run 6 leds from only 3 I/O

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