Joseph Jankowiak's Walnut and Cherry NeoPixel Christmas Star Build Brings Class to the Holidays
Built by hand from strips of walnut and cherry wood, a Raspberry Pi 3 running Python brings some holiday cheer to a maker's first tree.
Maker Joseph Jankowiak has built an incredibly attractive topper for his first Christmas tree, built from strips of walnut and cherry wood — and fitted with addressable RGB NeoPixels along the inside, driven by a Raspberry Pi.
"We got our first Christmas tree this year and needed a tree topper," Jankowiak explains. "Made with walnut and cherry, Danish oil finish, then some NeoPixels to light it up!"
The star is built from sandwiches of walnut and cherry wood, cut into strips and glued together. Each strip is then cut and glued to a partner to form the points of the star, which are then glued to one another to form the finished framework.
For the electronics, NeoPixel addressable RGB LED strips are glued into channels running through the inside of the frame with a single power-and-data cable coming out of the star's base. A layer of platic is used to both protect the LEDs and to provide some diffusion of their light.
"It's running off a Raspberry Pi 3 using a simple Python script," Jankowiak says of the computing side of the build. "I plan on changing that to a Pi Zero W and trying out the Node.js NeoPixel library so that I can make a nice web interface to control it."
The full video is now available on Jankowiak's YouTube channel.