Lighted Snowflake Treetopper
Description
This lighted snowflake tree topper has a ring of 2812 LEDs (neopixel lights) to create a dancing light show on top of the holiday tree. https://youtube.com/shorts/zsuSTsE30aI The parts were modeled in Fusion 360. The snowflake itself was printed from PETG but clear PLA will work just as well. Minimum walls and infill are recommended to allow the light to play throughout the inside of the snowflake. I ended up using 2 walls and 5% lightning (Cura) infill. Different infill patterns, number of walls, filaments, etc. will lead to noticeable visual differences. I considered attempting annealing in the oven as this does improve the translucency of the print, but it also (in my limited experience) causes substantial warpage and I wanted the parts to fit together well. If someone else tries this, I would love to hear/see the results! The lights are a strip of ten (10) WS2812 programmable LEDs. One of the photos shows the hub with the light strip wrapped around it, with a temporary rubber band to hold them in place. For final assembly, I used a dab of hot glue to secure them in place. I tapped the holes for M3 screws for the microcontroller and the hub lid. The microcontroller is an ATTiny85 based board (search for Digispark Tiny85) which has a smaller footprint than an Arduino Nano. It also has much less available program memory at around 6K. That was enough to include two routines: a rotating light routine and a random "dancing light" routine. Both are run several times with randomized colors and speed through each main program loop. I gifted the topper to my sister as I don't have a tree due to three rascally cats and a doofus dog.
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