Decorating the tree each holiday season was a family tradition in my household as a child. We had pretty basic ornaments, but I remember one very vividly. It was an electric Star Wars ship that plugged into one of the string light sockets and flashed with its own pattern.
Back then, an electric ornament on the tree beyond the strings of colored lights was a mind-blowing concept. Today it’s a lot more common, but that shouldn’t stop you from checking out this LED Snowflake Christmas Ornament.
Yes, it’s too late to order one for today’s holiday (but Thunkit is sold out anyway, good for him!). Of course, you can join the waitlist to show you want one for next year’s tree. But one of the coolest parts of the Tindie community is just being able to appreciate the interesting designs — this is open source so go take a look at the board design and firmware!
The snowflake is powered by a CR2032 battery, and uses a comparator and photoresistor circuit to detect the brightness in the room. It showcases a glistening snowflake pattern every 30 seconds when it’s dark, using an ATtiny24a microcontroller to generate an interesting animation. It’s simple, yet elegant!
Now that we’ve reached the holiday season, it’s time to start planning what the coming year will bring to our workbenches. Thunkit is worth a look for other fun projects like an SPI visualizer, a logic keychain SMD soldering kit, or a pogo-pin adapter for AVR programming.
