MICROPROCESSOR CONTROLLED XMAS TREE

摘要

Christmas is a great time of year for many of us and provides a great opportunity to share our gifts with one another. Over the years, we have seen a few designs for electronic Christmas Trees, and we created our own design to make as gifts for friends and family alike. The key to this design and its popularity (not to mention a few "tree custody battles") has been the combination of the simplicity of the design, the visual appearance of the components on the board, the fun patterns it displays, and the long battery life. By putting all of the components out in the open, they become an actual part of the product and not just the "guts inside the case." For the electronic hobbyist, it provides an opportunity to really show off those valuable soldering skills. Our first Tree 1.0 design was done over 10 years ago and we have been talking about all the improvements that Tree 2.0 would have including sound, multi-color LEDs, remote controls, programmability, and even anti-gravity, but we decided that there was a lot of value in just an incremental upgrade in the original design to add USB power, better power management, and more patterns.