It’s never a bad time to make a NeoPixel project, but the holiday season certainly does lend itself to creating large-scale, blinky, colorful displays. In this project, we’re taking the classic Christmas tree shape, cutting it out of wood and mounting some NeoPixels in the tree to create a festive yuletide light display.
The whole thing is controlled by a Circuit Playground Bluefruit board, which sits proudly on top of the tree in a 3D printed star with all ten of its NeoPixels shining brightly and swirling along with the additional pixels on the tree.
The lighting effects can be controlled via a Bluetooth connected phone and app.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.