While browsing through the Kwantum folder, I found an intresting, small and cheap christmastree.

It consists of 10 leds, powered by 2 AA batteries. No thrills or whistles. So I decided to buy one and see if I could mod it a little.

Unpacking the tree, and all seems to look ok.

And after inserting batteries it even lights! :)

My idea would be to remove the leds, put in RGB leds and let the leds be controlled by an ESP8266 microcontroller with a webinterface.

The wiring is simple, just 10 leds in series.

So we first remove all the leds.

The replacement leds will be 8mm PL9823’s I have lying around.

The leds have the usual construction, +5v, ground, data in and data out. So I wired them up in a string. All leds get +5v and groud, and the data in and data out are daisy chained together.

The leds are al little smaller then the holes, but with some hot glue it sticks together ok :)

From the front side it looks ok, good enought for a simple project.

Next couple of days I will take a look at hooking the tree up to the esp8266 and coding a bit of C. Check below for the link to the next blog entry:

Wifi christmas tree coding