WiFi-LED-XMAS-tree

     

WiFi LED XMAS tree Release status: experimental [box doku]
Description	Pimp an ordinary LED christmas tree and make it controllable via wifi
Author(s)	Uli, Rene, Marijn
Download	https://github.com/munichmakerlab/wifi-led-xmas-tree

Introduction

This project is about a WiFi LED XMAS tree consisting of an ordinary electronics gadget LED christmas tree with a pimped top LED and connected to a WEMOS D1 mini to enable WiFi control.

The hardware

• ordinary LED christmas tree (such as this one from Ali Express [1])
• pimped multi color controllable LED (we used the WS2812B on a small round white circuit board such as one of these [2]
• WEMOS D1 mini based on the ESP8266 (such as this one [3])
• Some additional resitors (about 150 Ohms) because the ones delivered with the ordinary tree are way to big which results in in very dim LEDs
• Some wire to power the tree with 5V and connect the control wires for the top LED (WS2812B controlled with serial protocol of FastLED) and the transistors which control the outer color LEDs (with pulse width modulation (PWM) of the D1)

• 

  Ordinary LED christmas tree in action

• 

  Pimped WiFi controlled LED christmas tree in action

The code

So far we programmed basic animation for the LEDs and a little webserver to accept commands for turning on and off seperate LED colors.

Find it in on GitHub in our Group

History (reverse order => latest on top)

• ordered 8 new trees, two are already promised to Tobi
• To make the basic LED animation more smooth, lately we programmed a Chen attractor function but did not finish it properly yet.

Want one for yourself?

• if you can spare roughly 5€ ask me - I just ordered some replenishment trees with

Todo

• Socket for the tree

 * maybe with a display to directly find out about the DNS name and/or IP address

List of known bugs

• yet to come...

Feature requests

• git-secrets to store WiFi credentials in GitHub
• proper encapsulation of animation functions
  • Marijn and I implemented a Chen attractor function to make the transitions more smoothly and random
• more animations for LEDs
• timer function for automatic wakeup/sleep (maybe simply based on time or location and sundown/sunrise?)
• crowd control of multiple trees at once
• put your ideas here...