The Internet Of Christmas Tree Watering

January 1, 2021 by 5 Comments

There’s nothing quite like a real Christmas tree, but as anyone who’s had one will know there’s also nothing like the quantity of needles that a real tree can shed when it runs short of water. It’s a problem [RK] has tackled, with a Christmas tree water level monitor that has integration with Adafruit’s cloud service to give a handy phone notification when more watering is required.

The real interest in this project lies in the sensor development path. There are multiple ways of water level sensing from floats and switches through resistive and light scattering techniques, but he’s taken the brave step of using a capacitive approach. Water can be used as a dielectric between two parallel metal plates, and the level of the water varies the capacitance. Sadly the water from your tap is also a pretty good conductor, so the first attempt at a capacitive sensor was not effective. This was remedied with a polythene “sock” for each electrode constructed with the help of a heat sealer. The measurement circuit was simply a capacitive divider fed with a square wave, from which an Adafruit Huzzah board could easily derive an amplitude reading that was proportional to the water level. The board then sends its readings to Adafruit.io, from which a message can be sent to a Slack channel with the notification enabled. All in all a very handy solution.

Plant care is a long-running theme in Hackaday projects, but not all of them need a microcontroller.

How The Gates (Almost) Stole Christmas

December 24, 2020 by 150 Comments
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house
Blue screens were everywhere; no response from the mouse
Windows, it seems, had decided to die
Because it had updated; we didn’t know why
But Santa had a plan while we were all in bed
He reformatted our server and installed Linux instead
In the morning we rushed in and what did we see?
Programs were running, and most of them free!
There was Chrome and Open Office and emacs for me
Not a penny was going to Mr. Gates’ fee
Now we have no more blue screens, ever, of course
Because Santa turned us on to that sweet open source

Sierpinski PCB Christmas Tree

December 4, 2020 by 3 Comments

It’s holiday time again! And that means it’s time to break out the soldering iron and the RGB LEDs! If you’re going to make a custom PCB to put those LEDs on, you’ll notice that you get few copies of your PCB in your order, so, might as well design it such that you can combine them all together into a single Sierpinski Christmas Tree, just like [Landon Carter] did.

Each PCB “tree” has three connections which can be used as either inputs or outputs by soldering one of two bridge connections on the PCB. The power and signal goes up and down through the tree, rather than across, so the connections go one on the top of the tree and two on the bottom. This way, each tree in the triangle can easily be connected, and each triangle can be easily connected to another. Each individual tree has three WS2812b-mini addressable RGB LEDs and the tree is controlled by an external Arduino.

The first order of 10 PCBs came in, which makes a 9 member tree – next up is a 27 member tree. After that, you’re going to need some pretty high vaulted ceilings in order to put these on the wall. On the upside, though, once the holidays are over, everything can be easily disconnected and packed away with the rest of the decorations. If you, too, are interested in RGB LED decorations, there are a few on the site for your perusal.

Vectron Adds Basic And Christmas Tree Control

November 16, 2020 by 9 Comments

Not content to leave things alone, [Nick Bild] has updated his nearly practical breadboard 6502 Vectron project once again by adding Tiny Basic and home tree automation. Instead of using an LCD module like last time, or his custom-built VGA output using 7400-series logic, [Nick] chose to go modern this time and implemented a VGA output using a TinyFPGA BX.

Tiny Basic was one of the first versions of Basic released after Bill Gates famous open letter to hobbyists in 1976. While Altair Basic was selling for $150, Tom Pittman wrote Tiny Basic for the 6800 and sold it for only $5 (don’t worry, Tom has since made it free to use). We got a kick out of browsing the Tiny Basic manual and learning that our serial number can be found on the paper tape leader, and that a Teletype will generally receive one more character, at least, after getting the X-OFF control signal.

In the video, you can see [Nick] running a short Basic program and operating his Christmas tree lights from the Vectron, although it’s only on-off control. He suggests that a PCB version is in the works, but he’s having trouble deciding when to quit adding features.  That’s a conundrum we know all too well.

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Computer Vision Maps Christmas Lights

November 3, 2020 by 27 Comments

There’s a small but dedicated group of folks out there who spend all year planning their Christmas decorations. These aren’t simple lawn ornaments or displays, either, but have evolved into complex lightning performances that require quite a bit of computer control. For some things, hooking up a relay to a microcontroller can get the job done, but [Andy] has turned to computer vision to solve some of the more time-consuming aspects of these displays.

Specifically, [Andy] has a long string of programmable RGB LED lights to wrap around a Christmas tree, but didn’t want to spend time manually mapping out each light’s location. So he used OpenCV to register the locations of the LEDs from three different camera angles, and then used a Python script to calculate their position in the 3D space. This means that he will easily be able to take the LEDs down at the end of the holidays and string them back up next year without having to do the tedious manual mapping ever again.

While [Andy] notes that he may have spent more time writing the software to map out the LEDs than manually doing it himself, but year-after-year it may save him a lot of time and effort, not to mention the benefits of a challenge like writing this software in the first place. If you want to get started on your own display this year, all you really need is some lights and a MIDI controller.

This Ugly Christmas Sweater Can Set You On Fire

January 11, 2020 by 9 Comments

While Christmas may have just passed, there’s just enough time left in winter to justify wearing your ugly Christmas sweaters for a few more days. If you’re not one of the lucky ones with an old sweater from Grandma, you can still turn your least favorite sweater into the most epic flame-throwing Christmas sweater there ever was.

[JAIRUS OF ALL], maker of explosive and other dangerous ideas, came up with a DIY ugly Christmas sweater that shoots flames on command. In order to produce the flame-throwing effect, he uses piping from a fish tank airline hose with a T connector attached to one end and epoxied to the middle of the sweater. The piping runs down the sweater to a can of butane fuel that he can control from the nozzle. Once the fuel is being released, he uses a lighter to initiate the flames from the sweater.

The flames are quite impressive, so definitely use caution if you intend to replicate this build in any way. It would be helpful to have a friend with a CO2 fire extinguisher nearby as well.

For a less life-threatening build, fellow builder [Price] created a Christmas tree-themed sweater lined with LEDs and USB-powered figurines, connected to a power supply in his pocket.

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The Fun Is On The Christmas Tree With This Playable Duck Hunt Decoration

January 3, 2020 by 5 Comments

‘Tis the season for leftovers, be they food, regifted presents, or the decorations left behind in the wake of the festivities. Not to mention the late tips we get for holiday-themed builds, like this Duck Hunt ornament that’s completely playable.

Details are sparse in [wermy]’s video below, but there’s enough there to get the gist. The game is based on the Nintendo classic, where animated ducks fly across the screen and act as targets for a light pistol. Translating that to something suitable for decorating a Christmas tree meant adding an Arduino and an IR LED to the original NES light pistol, and building a base station with a Feather and a small LCD screen into a case that looks like [The Simpsons] TV. An LED on each 3d-printed duck target lights in turn, prompting you to blast it with the gun. An IR sensor on each duck registers hits, while the familiar sound effects are generated by the base, which also displays the score. Given a background of festive blinkenlights, it’s harder than it sounds – see it in action briefly below.

[wermy] has done some interesting builds before, like a RetroPie in an Altoids tin and a spooky string of eyes for Halloween. We hope he’ll come through with a more detailed build video for this project at some point – we’re particularly interested in those beautiful multi-color 3D-prints.

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