Christmas Tree Ornaments

Custom built ornaments on the university Christmas Tree that students can change the color/pattern of through a website via a QR code

Over 500 unique visitors and 14,000 button presses in three weeks.

Control the tree at: http://ngtb95.wixsite.com/ngtb

Code available at https://github.com/NextGenTechBar/HemmTree


The Story Behind the Project

This has actually been a 3-year long project, getting better each year. When I started my on-campus job in IT, I learned that we had Christmas Ornaments that used to be twitter-controlled, but the person who built them and knew how they worked graduated, so they were now paperweights. I rebuilt the project from scratch a few weeks before Christmas, just in time to get them up on the tree, using a Raspberry Pi that crashed relatively often, wiring that made the whole thing difficult and confusing to set up, and a system that killed hardware far too frequently. And while it was used and loved, the twitter interface was really limiting the number of people who could use it and the ways they could...

Two years later, my boss and I decided to rebuilt the whole project from scratch again. My boss designed newer, prettier ornaments which I wired up, and I spent most of my time making each ornament communicate via WiFi instead of a long wire through the tree, making it so much more intuitive to set up and expandable to more than just those nine ornaments. Replace the twitter controls with a website and BOOM, prettier, all-around more intuitive tree for technicians and users that I suspect will be used long after I graduate.


Features

  • Fully modular-- an infinite number of ornaments can be added to the tree or around campus and sync up with each other.

  • Ornaments can be changed to different colors, patterns, or even moving animations.

  • Each ornament's code can be updated wirelessly and simultaniously to allow for the creation of new modes while ornaments are physically inaccessible, and quick deployment

  • Logging programs record each interaction and each time an ornament boots, disconnects or reconnects to wifi.

  • Ornaments pulse the time at the top of each hour

  • Ornaments automatically turn off at night


Details

Each ornament is based on an ESP32 wifi-capable microcontroller that receives instructions from the website via the MQTT IOT messaging protocol.