LED Christmas tree – Learning Electronics
Letter from Chris of PyroElectro.com in 2013 – Happy Holidays!
Here’s a project I know your readers will love! It’s an all-digital-hardware LED Christmas tree we’re calling the Christmas Tree O’Digital Logic.
The tree itself is composed of 64 LEDs built into a spiral sitting on a piece of protoboard. Underneath, the controller uses shift registers and a 555 timer to create two modes of display: a predictable pattern and a random pattern. This should light up any desk or shelf and bring merriment to your readers!
We’re also running a Kickstarter campaign to fund our second free online electronics course, “An Introduction To Digital Electronics.” We have just 4 days left to raise $2,124. If you would be so kind as to spread the word about our efforts, we’d be extremely grateful!
To build the tree, we’ll use 63 green LEDs and 1 red LED. Lots of wire will be needed to make the spiral + cone shape of LEDs from top to bottom. To build a random pulse generator, we’ll use some digital logic trickery with a 7404 hex inverter. A 555 timer will be used to drive 8 shift registers, which will control all 64 of the LEDs. Finally, a 4 bit timer should be thrown into the circuit in case we want to slow things down with a divider.
