Programming a Christmas Tree

As we planned for Christmas this year, my partner suggested that maybe we should replace the lights for the tree. “While we’re at it,” she asked, “is there anything out there that’s more controllable than just the ones that twinkle on and off?”

“Well,” I said, “there are NeoPixels…”

We decided that it would be great to have a tree where the lights looked and acted like candles, flickering gently in a soft, warm glow, and fading from a bright orange down to a low reddish glow by the end of the evening. We also wanted to realize the cheesy quote from It’s A Wonderful Life that “every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.”

Here’s a timelapse of the tree in action:

When you ring the bell, this happens:

The process of making it gave a chance to work with:

You can find the code and circuit in the gitHub repository for this project.
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