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The Project with the Most Heart Wins a Tool Kit Bundle, a $400 Shopping Cart, and a $100 Shopping Cart to Gift to Another Member!
Let Us Know Your Holiday Season Project Ideas in the Comments Below!
The Grand Prize: | 3 First Place Winners: | ||
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| Gift to Keep: Multicomp Tool Kit (~$500 value) plus a $400 Shopping Cart! | Gift to Give: A $100 Shopping Cart! | Gift to Keep: Tool Kit Bundle + $100 Shopping Cart! | Gift to Give: A $100 Shopping Cart! |
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Enter Your Holiday Special 20 Project for a Chance to Win: or tag your blog post HolidaySpecial20ch!
Contest Details: Project14 | Holiday Special 20: Win Tool Kit Bundles, Shopping Carts, and Gifts to Give Others!
Here is the first batch (Projects 1-10) of Holiday Projects to Forget 2020 on Project14:
Project 31: Connected Christmas Trees - Finished! by ntewinkel
Project 32: LED Firework Suite - the details by 14rhb
Project 33: 2D xmas tree pcb art (components INSIDE the pcb) by designer2k2
Project 34: Holiday Lights and Music Festival With Love and Cheer by ipv1
Project 35: Mini LED Christmas Tree by carmelito
Project 36: Albero di(Gi) Natale by costantinorizzuti
Project 37: Probably the best possible Christmas lights by czmusg3jh56fh0jw&maa
Project 38: Automatic christmas bell ringers. by danielw
Project 39: Christmas Magic aka Advent Calendar on stereoids by archiela
Project 40: Desktop Christmas Tree by jofas
Get Inspired by Past Holiday Special Projects:
Project14 | Holiday Special 20: 50 Holiday Projects to Get You in the Mood in 2020: Projects 1-10!
Project14 | Holiday Special 20: 50 Holiday Projects to Get You in the Mood in 2020: Projects 11-20!
Project14 | Holiday Special 20: 50 Holiday Projects to Get You in the Mood in 2020: Projects 31-40!
Project14 | Holiday Special 20: 50 Holiday Projects to Get You in the Mood in 2020: Projects 41-50!
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| Project 31: Connected Christmas Trees | Project 31: Connected Christmas Trees by ntewinkel:
Sometimes there's a lot more things to do than "some assembly" required would suggest during the holidays!
ntewinkel picked up some LED Christmas tree kits with "some assembly required"... The kit comes with 3 values for the LEDs: 330 ohm, 1k, and 2k. So I tried a few ways to balance out the brightness. Turns out the yellow is fine with 1k. The red seems correct with the 330 ohm resistor that was originally assigned to the green ones. But the 2k resistor in the kit is not enough for the green LEDs - he ended up bumping up to a 10k in the test above, and that looks much more balanced.
In what became known as the saga of motion sensors constantly sensing motion, ntewinkel finally decided to swap out to using pushbuttons, but those also still continuously acted like the buttons were being pressed. He thought he might have burnt out a GPIO pin or something, the way it was behaving. Given that the motion sensors take 5v input, he did end up hooking up the button to 5v (not sure if he pressed one or not!), and then realized YIKES! the button needs to go to 3.3v for the GPIO to handle it. So he tried hooking things up the same way I had it programmed on the Witty Wi-Fi - using the same GPIO as the Witty uses for the button and for the LEDs. That led him to wonder about the Wemos documentation that mentions pull-ups and pull-downs. He was thinking that meant the same as on the other Arduinos where you can, in code, specify input_pullup and pulldown. HOWEVER, after looking at the schematics he saw that's not the case for the Wemos! On the Wemos they are actual physical external resistors, not programmable.
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| Project 32: LED Firework Suite | Project 32: LED Firework Suite - the details by 14rhb :
The holidays are a time for festive lights and dazzling those who have meant so much to you throughout the year!
This started as nothing new, 14rhb made and added to them over the last few years although he had to do some repairs and re-programming this year. The video starts with his LED fireworks. He made these using individual WS2811 RGB LEDs and soldered each together. They are mounted to arms (old fiberglass tent poles) and each arm is paralleled up. The effect is free running, controlled by a PIC16F1509 microcontroller and incorporates some randomness of delay and which pattern is selected. He actually wrote all that code in assembly language before he decided to move to the Microchip XC8 compiler. The rate of change after initial 'explosion' slows to create an effect of the particles being ejected and they also dim slightly in intensity as they move out. Note to anyone wanting to copy this: it is very tedious work, cutting those sections of wire, tinning them, soldering each in the jig. And in an unheated shed during winter it was very cold.
14rhb added a few other effects to follow on from LED Fireworks - Festive Lights 2018 including an Arduino Uno powered effect with the initial streak as the rocket goes up. It’s his way of saying happy new year to everyone on Element14 (members and staff), and thanks for a great year of reading all your interesting and informative articles!
Following on from LED Fireworks - Festive Lights 2018 and LED Fireworks - Happy New Year this member made a variety of LED firework units and each is detailed in later sections; some units were started two years ago but have been modified and upgraded for this year. His submission is therefore a suite of projects rather than a single project.
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| Project 33: 2D xmas tree pcb art (components INSIDE the pcb) | Project 33: 2D xmas tree pcb art (components INSIDE the pcb) by designer2k2
Frohe Weihnachten! Sometimes even the smallest things have the biggest heart!
Last year, designer2k2 gifted the community by showing us a 10x10 pcb tree. The overall height was only 1.6mm and all the components were inside the PCB.
The pcb itself is using pcb art technique to give the shape of a tree covered in snow and some snowflakes and ball ornaments.
He won the Heart Trophy when he was gifted a $100 shopping cart from another member!
The assembly video is in German so use caption for English:
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| Project 34: Holiday Lights and Music Festival With Love and Cheer | Project 34: Holiday Lights and Music Festival With Love and Cheer by ipv1
The holidays are about creating memories by doing projects as a family!
Christmas is a very special time of the year for ipv1 and his family. Every year, their family creates memories by celebrating the holidays with a project they make together. Last year, after moving across the continent, his project was done on a budget. He started by procuring items from the dollar store and with a handful of components that he brought with him, they set out to build a mini Christmas festival. Their project consists of 2 parts which are intended to serve two different purposes. The first part is designed with the Raspberry Pi at the centre and Texas Instruments BLE lights as the end devices along with a sense hat for good measure. Python based web app allows for the control of colours for the budget tree as well as the jolly snowman. The second part employs two BBC:Micro bits talking to each other wirelessly and are allow for the control of a string of lights and a musical house.
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| Project 35: Mini LED Christmas Tree | Project 35: Mini LED Christmas Tree by carmelitoThe holidays when there's always a little time for a quick holiday projects and a learning circuit!
This quick project will get you in the festive mood. carmelito shows you how to make yourself a simple Mini LED Christmas Tree for your study table/computer desk. So fire up the 3D printer and grab some LEDs. He also suggests that you check out The Learning Circuit 02: Series & Parallel Circuits if you want to learn about parallel circuits!
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| Project 36: Albero di(Gi) Natale | Project 36: Albero di(Gi) Natale by costantinorizzuti
Buone Feste! The holidays are a great time to make something beautiful with an Arduino!
Albero di(Gi) Natale is the first project that costantinorizzuti made using Arduino. "Albero di Natale" means Christmas Tree in Italian. So the name has been created by the combination between "Albero digitale" and "Albero di Natale" and can be written down in both forms: Albero digi(Na)tale or Albero di(Gi) Natale. It is a small object (27cm x 23cm x 32cm): a sculpture, made of recycled materials (CD, copper and plastic pipes, electric cables, wood), equipped with LEDs controlled by Arduino. It is aimed at evoking the shape of a strange "exotic" tree decorated by Christmas decorations. It is a work in progress started in the fall of 2012 that currently has reached its final stage for the visual aspect. Arduino controls the lighting and the power off of the LEDs through a program that, in order to generate perceptually a periodic sequences, uses prime numbers for the computation of pulse lights intervals.
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| Project 37: Probably the best possible Christmas lights | Project 37: Probably the best possible Christmas lights by czmusg3jh56fh0jw&maa
The holiday's are a time for building displays that rival your neighbor's in raw nerdiness!
During Christmas 2016 czmusg3jh56fh0jw&maa stared in awe at his neighbor's fabulous Christmas light display. They had moving trains, characters, music, it was amazing. There was an ice cream van. The next year, he resolved to build a display to rival theirs. Not in volume, watts, quality, charm or creativity, but in raw nerdiness. In November of 2017, unreasonably late, he ordered 80 metres of 30 led/meter WS2812B RGB LED tape. When it arrived he took a week off work and started soldering, wiring and writing code like a madman. He recorded progressive video logs as the deadline rushed closer. He shared videos detailing how the controllers talk to the LEDs, which protocols he used, and lots of other detail.
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| Project 38: Automatic christmas bell ringers. | Project 17: Automatic christmas bell ringers. by danielw:
The holidays are a time for automating bell ringers using an Arduino!
After rummaging through many boxes of what his family unilaterally called 'junk', danielw concluded that he needed to order some RC servos. He could have bought a servo controller but he already had a couple of Arduino pro mini boards, so deciding to use one of them, he set to hacking. The project is based on his laptop running a Python program that interprets the musical sequence and outputs the commands over the same FT232 USB COM port as is used for programming the Arduino. The Arduino receives the commands and moves the servos as required.
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| Project 39: Christmas Magic aka Advent Calendar on stereoids | Project 18: Christmas Magic aka Advent Calendar on steroids by archiela
The holidays are a time for Advent Calendars and hiding chocolate behind each door!
This project is best described as a take/dream on Advent Calendar. We all know how these things typically work and we all have enjoyed them in our childhood. For those that don't know it is a way of tracking how many days are left util Christmas while eating getting to eat chocolate or cookies. Basically calendar starts on December 1st and goes until December 24th and there is chocolate hidden behind each door. You are supposed to open the door on each day and get your chocolate - what an amazing way of waiting for Christmas. However, you are not supposed to open any future days! He always loved these things and one day while on a 5 hour driving trip with his wife, for whatever reason they started having this idea of building their own smart, fun advent calendar. They jotted all the ideas and requirements they wanted this to have and the project was born from the idea.
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| Project 40: Desktop Christmas Tree | Project 19: Desktop Christmas Tree by jofasThe holidays are a time for adding much needed holiday cheer to your workspace!
jofas will have a chance to remake his project with better features and we hope that he shares it with the rest of the community when he does. His project was a small plastic Christmas tree that can sit on your desk to bring holiday cheer to your workspace. The lights have a "twinkle" effect to make your holidays even more magical.
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