Raspberry Pi Christmas Tree

About

Merry Christmas! This is my homemade Christmas tree powered by a Raspberry Pi, ANAVI Light pHAT and an RGB LED strip. This is definitely not the cheapest solution for a holiday decoration but it is fun and an efficient way to practice your programming skills.

The setup requires a Christmas tree, a Raspberry Pi, ANAVI Light pHAT, an RGB LED strip, a couple of power supplies and a microSD card with the Raspbian GNU/Linux distribution. Any model or version of Raspberry Pi with 40 pin header is suitable for this project, including Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 0.

You can use any 12V RGB LED strip. Select the length of the strip corresponding to the size of your Christmas tree. These 12V RGB LED strips are a commodity. They are very affordable and easy to find. In this video I am using 1 meter long strip with 30 LEDs in it.

Steps

Follow the steps below to build the project:

1. Assemble the hardware with your bare hands. Attach the RGB LED strip to ANAVI Light pHAT using a screw driver and boot the Raspberry Pi.

2. On your Raspberry Pi open a terminal and install the latest versions of piGPIO and Git by typing the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y pigpio git

3. Get the source code from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/AnaviTechnology/anavi-examples.git 

4. Build the demo application:

cd anavi-examples/anavi-light-phat/light-demo
make

5. Run the application:

sudo pigpiod
./demo

Happy hacking and enjoy the holidays :)