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Every Christmas I always have some project that I want to do but then then time flies and I can't get it finished. Last year, I decided to actually finish one project and I built the best Christmas lights ever. This was a quick and easy project that needed the following ingredients. You will need multiple LED strings depending upon the size of your tree. Here is 1 LED on the string: You can see the ribbon cable connecting them together. Each LED is about 12mm in diameter. The ribbon cable hides well, but perhaps one day I will paint the wire. One LED, the power supply and the Arduino are inside this box. I used the first LED in the box to light the box and to strain relief the cable. You can pass a USB cable inside if you want to reprogram it. The box is a simple laser cut 6mm plywood box. The HEX hole pattern was overkill and almost caused a fire in the laser! Of course I have a laser cutter in my shop. Everyone should have one. Currently I am simply running the demo code which cycles through a number of animations. One day I plan to add a DMX software in the arduino and a raspberry pi as the controller. Then I can be lazy and write code on the couch via WiFi to change the animations. IMG_0044.mov