Othko's Christmas Tree

[Othko97]

So, usually I have a 3 foot tree in my room, but seeing as how it would only have been up for about a week this year I figured there was no point. Plus it's slightly dull, the same thing every year, always decorated in the same fashion. I therefore decided to mix things up and have a bit of fun.


I first created a small approximation to some form of conifer using the Japanese art of origami, a craft of which I know little, and somehow am worse in practice. Unfortunately I do not have an image of this tree before the rest of my project began, but you can probably extrapolate backwards (dextrapolate?) to what it looked like.


I also own a raspberry pi, and during the summer I purchased a reasonable amount of electronic components, so you can probably see exactly where this is going. I began with testing various methods of attaching electronic components to paper and each other sans breadboard, and in the absence of solder, crocodile clips or anything else which may have been effective. In the end I adopted a method I dubbed "Tinfoil and Dreams", essentially wrapping the offending connections in tinfoil, applying sellotape and praying for success. I first tried this with a single LED, which somehow worked to my astonishment. So great was my shock I decided that this saga was worthy of record, perhaps an epic poem should things really get going. However, I waited until more LEDs were attached in order to acquire a more impressive picture, so I left it until an entire two were added and were working tentatively. (There should have been a picture here, but I can't figure out how to link to just one part of an imgur album so just open the album )


As you can see in the second image of the album, the method of tinfoil and dreams is not 100% effective, but the random dimmening of LEDs adds a somewhat twinkling effect, and knocking the tree has the charming effect of disrupting all the lights in a beautiful fashion.


This tentative process of prayer and construction continued for a long while, as applying the tinfoil was fiddly to say the least. Testing the full tree assembled was also beginning to prove difficult by about the fourth layer as the wires were shorter than ideal. The full extent of this was becoming apparent, so I began selecting longer wires at about this time, which alleviated the problem somewhat but also made my wiring look messier. I was kind of hoping it would look somewhat like tinsel, but this was a rather forlorn hope.


Eventually this process was completed, and I now have a paper tree upon which are several LEDs, barely working unless they really fancy it, tethered to a breadboard with an attachment stronger than the love of a newlywed couple. Personally I believe this only adds to it's personality.


I have now run out of layers on the tree and also electronic components (well, ones useful to a tree at any rate), and so will work on programming some pretty patterns into the lights tomorrow, should be fun.

[Jubal]

Not sure if this is best here or in the Artisans' Guilds and suspect the latter - it's awesome, though, either way, look forward to seeing more

[Othko97]

Yeah I wasn't sure either, I assumed here due to the programmable nature of the thing, but feel free to move it if it's in the wrong place.

[Jubal]

On balance, moved as whilst it's programmable, you need to actually have the artefact for the program to be terribly useful.

How did the programming go? 

[Othko97]

Yeah, I figured it would probably be better elsewhere

The programming is easy enough for creating patterns and such, the only issue is that the connections are pretty weak on the lights, so they often turn off at random. I'm trying to think of a way to get things nicely twinkling. I sort of got a nice effect by just selecting a light at random and switching it, but it fairly often caused it to have like 2 lights on. Probably going to prevent less than half of the lights turning off and reduce the pause.

[Jubal]

You should get some videos of the progress, we can put them on The Exilian Channel