With 2020 turning out the way it did, I thought it'd be nice to try and make more of my Christmas presents than just buy things. Some of the things turned out pretty good (the project below), if I do say so myself. Some would be a little more problematic. Who would have thought one of the biggest challenges in making snow globes would be getting the snow to NOT float. This project was inspired by a similar project in Nuts and Volts a few years back, that itself was inspired by a 3D printed tree project on thingiverse. The Nuts and Volts project utilized a wireless connection between a smart phone and the tree to control things. I decided to keep things a little more simple since some of my gift recipients dont have smart phones. One of my go to microcontrollers is the Arduino Pro Mini. They are fairly inexpensive but still let you do quite a bit. In this case they pair quite well with some WS2812 based LED rings ranging in size from a single pixel to 32 pixels, with each ring being controlled independent of the others. A simple switch is provided to cycle through the modes available. Currently there are 4 modes available: Rainbow, Sparkle, Red/Green, and Fireworks. The modes where heavily inspired by my work on In Plume, a large scale sculpture with LED lighting. If you're ever in the Kansas City area it's a sight to see at night. Two different types of prints were used for the trees: a white based ABS plastic that was then painted, and a clear PLA platic left as is. I think both turned out well, and can't really pick one over the other. Here are some pictures of my builds during their various stages along with a couple videos showing the finished build. Return to my projects homepage

Return to my projects homepage