Geeky LED Christmas Tree Ornament

I've been feeling a little 'Christmassy' lately and I decided to build myself a geeky Christmas decoration.

The idea is to build a wooden Christmas tree that has little blinking LEDs to represent a string of lights.

To this end I set about researching a suitable circuit which I redesigned to make it absolutely minimal in terms of complexity. The wonderful tool I used to do this is Fritzing. Think of Fritzing as a CAD package for circuits. It's free and it's great, I cannot recommend it enough.

So here is the Fritzing sketch of my circuit

Fritzing is just superb!

Designing it first in Fritzing helps you get your head around the design. So then I buit the circuit on a prototype board.

Sorry for the nasty mobile phone camera photo! :-/

My prototype board is a little small for this project, so I only wired three LEDs and not the ten that will be part of the actual circuit.

Next I cut the tree from 18mm MDF freehand on my bandsaw, painted it and glued it to a simple stand. You can see it here beside the prototype circuit for scale.

Feels like Christmas already!

With the prototype circuit copied onto a more permanent stripboard version of the circuit, I drilled some holes in the tree and threaded through the LEDs.

The LEDs 'twinkle' like little Christmas tree lights. Ho-ho-ho! Just in time for Santa Claus!

Home made Santas

It's almost Christmas, so how about some home made Santa ornaments?

Painted and finished

Cut on my CNC router of course!

Hot off the router

My missus did the design work in Photoshop and I vectorised the images in CorelDraw, before importing them into CamBam to generate the toolpaths. Finally the exported toolpaths were imported into EMC2 for cutting.

If you would like to cut your own Santas, then visit my downloads page for the DXF.

Merry Christmas!

A note on cutting MDF.

I've been cutting MDF parts here and there for years. Since I'm not doing this commercially, I haven't really considered just how nasty the dust that comes off this stuff is. It's REALLY bad for you. So I need to get some air filtration organised. Until then I'm wearing my respirator and goggles while cutting this.