Internet-connected Festive Tree

Introduction

It's the holidays and that 3D printer is burning a hole in your pocket! Isn't now the perfect time to print tiny trees and fill them with electronics?

I found this great little tree on Thingiverse.

They used them to make a strand of lights, but I think we should internet-connect them into a standalone lamp. Let's 3D print one and wire it up! I used a fast honeycomb fill on the print to get the great lighting effect shown in the video.

Assembly

Let's assemble our components:

Insulate those legs with some heat shrink tubing!

Let's get the base ready!

Let's wire it up!

The Firmware

Once you've got the tree assembled and wired up to your Photon, head over to https://build.particle.io and copy the firmware from the link below. From there you can tweak the code and flash it wirelessly to your device.

You could imagine using an IFTTT integration or custom code to make the tree react to important information (like if it's going to rain or snow), etc. I wanted to add a rainbow mode, but I wasn't sure where I wanted the delay to land; here's one that was a little too fast - party mode?

A 10 ms delay seemed to be a bit better:

Easy and quick! Enjoy adding ambient notification lights to your prints!