ATTannenbaum

attiny

It’s that special time of year again where the smell of baking cookies fill the house and shopping mall parking lots are filled with idiots and very angry people. [Kevin] thought it would be a good idea to build an LED Christmas tree and ended up building a great looking tree that’s also very simple.

In the video, the imgur album, and the github, [Kevin] shows us the simplest way to make a color-changing LED Christmas tree. The circuit uses LEDs to drop the voltage and to provide a nice glow around the base of the tree. After that, it’s just an ATtiny13 and some LEDs in a very nice freeform circuit.

Of course, if LED Christmas trees aren’t your thing, [hb94] over on reddit created an LED menorah. Pretty nifty he used an 8-position DIP switch for the circuit. Let’s just hope someone gave him a soldering iron for the last night of Hanukkah.

10 thoughts on “ATTannenbaum

  1. aaagh!! why does Hackaday do that? I post anonymously – it tells me to log in and I shrug and comply, then double posts!?! I just noticed this and wonder how many other times it did the same?!

  2. Clever! I particularly like the RGB LEDs. But I have to wonder why it needs a microcomputer?

    Way back in 1986, I was broke and needed something for Christmas presents. I came up with a Christmas tree that used a CD4093, wired as 4 RC oscillators. Each output drove two LEDs, one high and one low. A capacitor in series instead of the usual resistor eliminated the power lost in a resistor. A ninth LED was in series with the battery, to provide a flickering “start” on top (and reversed battery protection).

    I’ve made hundreds of them since! You can see it at http://www.sunrise-ev.com or get one assembled on eBay item# 271124335043.

    To build an RGB tree, how about using a 74HC132 (hex schmitt trigger) for six oscillators? Use half common-anode and half common-cathode RGB LEDs, wired to the 6 oscillators in a matrix.

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