Christmas Tree USB Arduino

[Tiago]

How tech is your Christmas?

Here, i make a small Christmas Tree for my girlfriend, made of an Arduino Nano with 25 leds.
It started fine, but for 25 leds i needed 50 cables... what a mess in such a small space...
quite difficult to put all together.
I used 13 resistances and a small bradboard.

[Demon Cleaner]

Nerd Your girlfriend must really love you!! Mine would kick my ass if I would spend time on stuff like this, it's either the real thing (the bigger the better), or nothing. But to be honest, she also would probably find it cute, as it would be made with love to her, that's basically how any girl works on this planet.

[Harrison]

I saw your post about this on facebook earlier today. Really cool that you managed to create an LED christmas tree with computer control. But as you said, there are a lot of wires! So many there are more than the tree itself.

Wouldn't there be any way to use much thinner wires, or a way to daisy chain leds in some way like with commercial tree lights?

[Tiago]

@Harrison: Sure i could use commercial lights, but that would not be a DIY project. That's the fun of it. Trying to create every single component.
I had solder every wire on the led (2 wires of each), solder 1 resistance for each 2 leds, and in the end program the arduino to flash the lights as i want. This part is not finished yet.

@Demon: the real thing, sure, that will for the next year, i pretend to do it on a real size tree, but this time i will not use my own leds, i will just buy the commercial ones, something like 30 in a row, but i will buy 6 or 7 sets, and then remove all the electronic they have, and program them as i wish.

Arduino is really a nice board. This one the "Nano" cost me 7 dollars only including chipping !!