Regular Christmas trees don’t emit light, nor do they react to music. If you want both things in a holiday decoration, consider this build from [dbmaking].
An ESP32-D1 mini runs the show here. It’s hooked up to a strip of WS2812B addressable LEDs. The LED strip is placed on a wooden frame resembling the shape of a traditional Christmas tree. Ping-pong balls are then stacked inside the wooden frame such that they act as a light diffuser for the LEDs behind. The microcontroller is also hooked up to an INMP441 omnidirectional MEMS microphone module. This allows the ESP32 to detect sound and flash the LEDs in time, creating a colorful display that reacts to music. This is achieved by using the WLED web installer to set the display up in a sound reactive mode.
It’s a fun build, and we’d love to tinker around with coding more advanced visualizer effects for a build like this. We’ve seen builds that go the other way, too, by toning down excessive blinkiness in Christmas decorations.
WLED is incredibly good. It has made using LEDs so easy that we can just focus on creativity.
I have completed my outdoor flagpole Christmas tree using WLED. It has 2400 LEDs draping in 24 separate lines circling the flagpole from 10 meters up the top down to ground.
It can be seen from quite a distance and the effects you can achieve are truly impressive.
Right now it runs independently, but I might I can also use Xlights through WLEDs DDP interface and make something truly magnificent.