Embedded Lab

Christmas lights are an important aspect of the winter holidays in our country. Every year, we look for new fun ways of lighting outside and decorating the Christmas tree. This ESP8266 driven RGB LED lighting for Christmas tree from Evil Genius Labs is an artistic creation and possibly a good option to try if you’re bored of using the same old lighting for your tree.

The 6.5’ tall white tree gets lighted with 250 WS2811 RGB LEDs, and controlled by an ESP8266 microcontroller using the FastLED library. The animation can be controlled with a web-based app stored in the on-board flash memory of the ESP8266 board, as well as with an infrared remote control. Other features include adjustable brightness, autoplay with adjustable interval, multiple procedural animations using a fully 3D mapped layout (X, Y, and Z axes, radius, and angle), allowing scrolling and rotating in any arbitrary direction, etc.

Video below shows a demo.

The web app is a single page app with separate files for js and css, using jQuery and Bootstrap. It has buttons for On/Off, a slider for brightness, a pattern selector, and a color picker (using jQuery MiniColors). Event handlers for the controls are wired up, so you don’t have to click a ‘Send’ button after making changes. The brightness slider and the color picker use a delayed event handler, to prevent from flooding the ESP8266 web server with too many requests too quickly.