The premise is simple. Every day, you press a button & an animation plays & lights up one more day. There are 24 lights, so on Christmas Eve, when you press the button, the tree is finally lit. Press the button on or after Christmas Day, and a different animation plays.

I spent a some time looking at Christmas tree templates & designs online. I settled on the below design. Then map out how many lines of lights you want, and now many per line. This is the most tedious part. Take extra care here - a minor angle difference here will be much more noticeable on the finished product.

Unless you want to do a lot of soldering, you will need to consider how far apart the LEDs are on your strip.

I chose a very thin plywood as I would be able to cut it with a utility knife and a metal ruler, giving me (hopefully) precise cuts.

I then soldered the Arduino and LEDs together & did a quick test fit to see how things look

The code for this is quite simple. It consists of a array of colors & a few functions to provide the animations. I plan to adjust this as we go based on feedback from the family!

Once the code was written, it was time for a test. I used hot-glue with the help of painters tape to put the LEDs in place. Time for a test!

Next I started working on a base/box for the tree to stand on, as well as giving some substance by converting the essentially 2D tree into a 3D box. With the boxes created, we could now start cutting & gluing the veneer.

The "panel" piece below is cut (badly) on purpose, so as to have some give to it. Hidden under it will be the push button which triggers the animation.

I captured a few stills from a short video to illustrate how the light patterns work.

←

→

Here is a quick video I took showing the process from start to finish