IoT Christmas Trees

My latest maker project has been running for a good chunk of the year and has been a really cool thing to do to keep me occupied during lockdown since I'm not really one to binge watch box sets.  I've been making Internet connected Christmas trees as gifts for close family.  They're designed to be ambient ornamental decorative pieces with a funky twist of interactivity.  The video I produced probably explains them best...

As you can see from the video, each tree is deliberately different.  I thought it would be more interesting to have a completely different wooden design for each.  My dad did the woodwork which saved me quite a lot of time and allowed me to concentrate on writing the software and doing the electronics not to mention building and painting each tree.  There's a good few hours work in each of these things.

Operation of the trees is pretty simple with the most complicated bit, like with most of these things, being the initial set up to get them onto your WiFi network.  For that, and to explain the basics of how they work along with a bit of troubleshooting information, I wrote a little user manual to go with them.  After all, it will be our closest family members that receive one of these and so I can always help out remotely (and potentially fix any issues that arise).  The left button on each tree cycles round a set of pre-defined colour schemes.  However, these can be changed on a per tree basis should someone want a different colour or configuration.  Similarly, the trees can be operated remotely but I've yet to write a decent interface to do so.  The right button on each tree is where the fun is, causing all the other trees to change light pattern for some period of time.  Again, this is all configurable per tree but by default they all cause the same green and red frenzied light pattern which should be very noticeable in the corner of your room should it occur.

Finally, big thanks to James Sutton and his original iotree project was in no small amount an inspiration for my work here.  Although, the implementations are different both physically and in software there's still a huge amount of overlap.  James was also responsible for running an IoT hackathon at work (we're colleagues) introducing a lot of the technology I would need in order to perform this build.  Thanks again, James!

I've also written more details on the technical implementation.  But, I'll sign this post off with a closer look at each tree in pictures...