Thanksgiving may be over, but Christmas and twinkling holiday lights are headed our way. And really, what could be more appropriate for Makers than strings of artfully strung Christmas lights controlled by an Atmel-based Arduino?
One such DIY LED array recently came to our attention, courtesy of the folks at HackADay.
Indeed, a Maker by the name of Anx2k created permanently mounted Christmas lights using LEDs left over from another project. More specifically, the RGB pixels are mounted underneath the tiles on the roof, three per tile, two facing up on either side of the tile and one facing out at an angle in the middle.
“All the wires [run] into his attic where he has an electrical box serving as the main control hub. He uses an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) to control them and a 460W computer power supply to provide the juice,” explained HackADay’s James Hobson.
“The LED modules themselves are Adafruit RGB pixel strings. There’s actually three of the LED modules per tile – two shining up to illuminate the tile, and one shining out.”
As you can see in the video above, Anx2k configured a number of slick patterns for the Arduino Uno to run, including color drop, blended Christmas, spectrum chase, Christmas alternate, random stars and rainbow.
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