DIY the Coolest Possible Lights for Your Christmas Tree

You can’t celebrate Christmas without a truly blinding number of lights adorning your house and your tree. But even the best lights on the market only have a handful of preset effects patterns to choose from and those aren’t much fun. Instead of buying those, you can follow John Park’s guide to use Adafruit NeoPixel LED strings to light your Christmas with whatever effects your heart desires.

NeoPixels are individually addressable RGB LEDs, which means you can set each LED to whatever color and brightness you want. If you have a bunch of NeoPixels, you can coordinate the color and brightness changes to create neat effects. Park’s guide demonstrates a really easy way to go about that.

For this project, Park used a strand of NeoPixels that is available in star, heart, and ball shapes. The shapes diffuse the light nicely and make the strands perfect for Christmas trees. A single strand might work for a small desktop tree and you can chain together multiple strands to decorate a larger tree — just be sure to follow Adafruit’s recommendations for power distribution.

To control the NeoPixles, Park chose the Adafruit Sparkle Motion board. It is very user-friendly and works with both WLED and XLights. Between those two, you can create everything from basic blinking effects to full-on music-synced light shows. Add a power supply and enclosure, and you’re ready to go.

Park’s guide explains how to set up WLED, which will let you configure the LEDs and effects over Wi-Fi from a smartphone. There are a whole bunch of effects options to get you started, which you can then customize to suit your particular holiday tastes.