Unfortunately, I didn't manage to complete all of the features I had hoped for with my ornaments. Not long after Christmas I caught a flu that knocked me out pretty completely for a surprisingly long time, and when I finally returned to the land of the living I had to play catch-up in my personal and professional life, so my ornaments got pushed to the back burner. Even so, I had high hopes for completing them within the time provided by the contest, but when I jumped into programming the Yun it was just too different from what I had done before and I ran out of time.
The ornaments are in a minimally usable state: The physical objects themselves are designed and readily printable, the library I wrote to control the Infineon board works, and the prototype I built does just what it should. The only thing it's missing is the IoT half of the project, so unfortunately you can't remote control the colors, and they don't yet act as notification devices.
I still intend to complete them, because it's still a neat project, but unfortunately I won't be able to do so within the timeline set for the contest. C'est la vie.
Building the Ornament
Step one, naturally, is to print the parts. Attached to this post you will find the three files you need: ornament mk2 - outer top.stl and ornament mk2 - outer bottom.stl will produce the outer shell of the ornament, while ornament mk2 - inner.stl will produce half of the inner support structure for the strip lights (you'll need to print two copies of this one). I've also included the source file that creates these STLs, ornament mk2.scad, and if you're so inclined (and are familiar with openscad) you can make modifications to the design.
Once you have them printed, you'll notice both the inner and outer shells have five holes in them. These are sized so pieces of 1.75mm filament will fit into them and can be used to anchor the halves together (or simply to align them if you plan to add additional glue). Depending on your printer's first layer calibration you may need to help the holes out with a quick bit of trimming or drilling, but don't expand them too much as you want lots of friction to hold the filament bits in place.
After you have the two inner pieces printed and assembled, you'll want to attach the LED strips. The design is sized for the commonly available 5050 LED strip lights, although I believe most LED strip lights are fairly uniform in terms of strip size, it's just LED size that changes. But you may find that assumption to be incorrect. If it does turn out to be wrong, you've got the source file and can easily modify the channel widths to fit.
I found that hot glue works well for attaching the strips to the plastic. Once they're tacked down (careful to avoid the solder pads on either end!) it's time to wire. You want to connect the strips in series, and you want to connect each solder pad to the identical pad on the next strip (i.e. 12v to 12v, red to red, green to green, etc). You also want to make sure both you leave two LED strips with unconnected top pads when you're finished linking all of your strips, because this is where the input and output connections will go.
I chose one strip to be "strip one", then connected the bottom of that strip to the top of "strip two". I did the same for strip two and strip three, as well as strip three and strip four. I then connected the bottom of strip four to the bottom of strip five. This left the top of strip one and strip five open so I could have the input and output connections coming out on the same side. Luckily for us, these LED strips are non-polar, so you don't need to worry about orientation or getting the right sides together at all.
In the above picture, you can see the strips attached and wired together, with the input connection already in place. I made a bit of a mistake in that I soldered the input wire in place before threading it through the hole in the outer shroud. The hole in the shroud is easily big enough to allow both sets of wires to pass, but the connectors won't fit. So make sure you don't do what I did, and thread your wires through the outer shell first.
Once everything is wired together, start on your next one! Using the "4pin male to female extension wire" for LED strips, which you can easily find on Amazon, you can link together as many ornaments as you need. A single 5m roll of LED strips should make ten separate ornaments, and a single Infineon shield can easily power them all simultaneously.
When all the ornaments are assembled and connected, wire the first one back into the Infineon board, and upload the Arduino sketch and library found in this post: IoT Christmas Ornaments - The Software, Part 1
The linked post explains how to change the code to make it do what you'd like and, for now, that's all you can do. Unless you'd like to finish the incomplete Yun/IoT portion of the project... or you don't mind waiting. Sooner or later I'll get these working correctly, but for now, this is where the project ends.
It was a fun time, and interesting components, but in the end life got in the way and slowed things down too much.
