Light up your Christmas from your phone.
Things used in this project
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Hardware components
Story
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Here is what our family created for Christmas:
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Elfie is anxious to do his tricks
How to build it
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You need to get the some driftwood, a tree trunk and a metal round bar from your hardware store. Carefully choose the driftwood branches so they form a triangle when piled up.
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Drill a hole in the trunk and in the center of each branch. We are going to use the trunk as a base, so stick in the metal bar and start piling up your branches from longest to shortest. Remember that this could be a family activity so invite everyone in the house to place some branches!
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Raw materials
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Once assembled, get some christmas LED lights and add the decorations to your Christmas tree.
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Here be dragons
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For this part there is HIGH VOLTAGE involved so kindly ask everyone to get back to their activities for the time being.
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Let me re-state that: do not do this if you do not feel comfortable working with high voltages.
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If you don't feel comfortable with high voltages that's OK, just buy a WemoĀ® Mini Smart Plug or similar and proceed to next step. Oh wait, even better, use an IoT Power Relay from SparkFun. More info about it here.
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I used an "ancient" Particle Core I had around (you can use a Photon too or most probably any other Arduino compatible MCU) and wired it together with a Wemos mini relay [https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1_mini_shields:relay_shield] (or any Arduino compatible will do) and a 5v 1Amp power source that I recycled from an old phone charger. You are going to need a plastic box and electrical tape.
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Time to be creative, wire and solder the pieces together:
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If you get lost, follow this schematic (remember that you want the relay to open the hot wire, so connect it to the COMMON and Normally Open pins):
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The end result should look like this:
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Sorry, the end result should rather look like this:
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Once fully assembled, it's time for flashing the firmware.
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Schedule
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You can control the schedule with the following lines:
const String timeOn = "07:00AM";
const String timeOff = "08:00PM";
Feel free to change them to whatever fits you.
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Remote control
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I declared a couple of cloud functions in Particle, so I could control it from my phone or a browser:
Particle.function("turnOff", turnOff);
Particle.function("turnOn", turnOn);
Control it with the Particle app:
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Control it with Porter:
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Control it from the Particle devices interface:
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Conclusion
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I've initially planned on working on this for an hour or so in a snowy sunday, but few challenges with size of the initial 5V charger not fitting the project box made it a bit longer. But hey! The tree lights up every morning and shuts down at bed time these days.
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Merry christmas to the Hackster community!
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Help
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If you require professional help with your projects, don't hesitate to write me a line about your needs at [email protected]. Thank you!
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Schematics
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Schematic
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follow the white rabbit
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Code
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Firmware
Load in Particle Build and flash it
