There is an apparent Christmas tree shortage this year, so we only have a 7ft Douglas Fir. But I still managed to cram it full of 450 WS2811 LEDs and, new this year, 600 LED mini lights.
Good news. Last year I apparently had the foresight to assign the tree controller a static IP. This year, I plugged it in and it was all ready to go, no new SmartThings configuration required!
The lights are WS2811 individually programmable LEDs, controlled by an Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 micro controller. The software is mostly just LED libraries, and some REST APIs I added. It’s fun. :)
Last night my 4 year old read a story to me (that she doesn’t have memorized). Tonight my 2 year old moves to a big girl bed. *sniff* no, seriously, it’s just a Christmas tree pine needle in my eye, that’s all.
Built my girls some custom bunk bed lighting. Repurposed setup like my Xmas tree. HUZZAH ESP8266 from Adafruit hooked up to SmartThings for remote control.
The last couple years, I’ve obsessed over some custom individually addressable LEDs for my tree. A fake/prebuilt tree would simplify a lot of my process — but I did not want a plastic tree.
Here was an early mapping prototype (pre-tree). The lit pixel is controlled by the mapping app, via REST API. In practice, this proved to be a HELL of a lot harder on the tree, and I had to tweak my technique for placing the item in the world map.
2016 was my first WS2812 tree — so I just focused on the concept. But I knew all along that such a systematic approach wasn’t going to work for our style/on a real tree.
Have been spending a bit of quarantine time tinkering with SceneKit and ARKit. Last I did this was w/ my xmas tree, but that used all code generated geometry primitives. Now I’m working on bringing in models from 3D software, and WOW does the learning curve get rapidly steep. 😳
A friend asked about the different types of lights in the display
The roofline are all C9 style ws2811, the far tree (that’s way too bright right now) is 800 bullet pixels. The skeleton is wrapped and the giant bulbs stuffed with pixels.
