I made a glowing Christmas ornament yesterday. It slowly morphs from red to green to blue and back.

I didn't have crimp connectors or solder on hand, so I just used Gorrila tape and a breadboard, which seems to be working ok.

Here is a picture of the prototyping stage:



The origami covering thing is an origami balloon made out of tracing paper. I just poke the LED in through the hole you blow through, and it seems to stay on ok.

Here are some pictures of it on the tree:





The wires go up the tree and along the branch, you can see my wonderful taping job here:



The Arduino and breadboard are at the base of the tree, I didn't get pictures of it before I wrapped the box, but here is the end product:




Code and schematics can be seen on a popular Git repository host.

Nice work! I'm particularly happy to see that Radio Shack 300-in-One kit in that first photo; those kits have a dear place in my heart. If you're planning a version 2.0, would you consider integrating the controller into the ornament, and use a Christmas bulb-style plug to power the controller and LED? Or am I overestimating the scale of this project?

I like this. What I want to see at one point is a Cemetech ornament.

How about this great C + lightning bolt one by CalebHansberry?

I was actually thinking of doing that at some point, not sure if there is an Arduino (or even a microcontroller chip) small enough to that though. What may work instead would be to have much thinner wires coming out of the ornament, and just put an Arduino nano on the tree branch itself. Or maybe put the Arduino nano into a normal Christmas bulb and have wires connect the two ornaments.

Also I should probably learn some other methods of connecting wires besides tape and breadboards.

Why bother with Arduino if you're not controlling multiple LEDS or controlling it from the internet? Just use 555 timers or even those LEDs that fade all by themselves.

I didn't know they made LED's that fade by themselves... sounds like an idea.

Yeah they're pretty cheap too. Here are some 12v ones.

12V? I was sorta hoping it was 3V...

Just an example. Besides it's probably just a resistor inline.

Ah ok.

That one is great indeed. A glowing one would be interesting to see as well, though.

I came up with another idea for this. Same setup having the arduino at the base of the tree, but with some changes:

1. Arduino would be powering 5 or 6 ornaments instead of 1.
2. Arduino would get the ambient noise in the room and set the ornament color based on that. So if there is a lot of noise they glow red, otherwise they glow blue.

Result: Mood Ornaments!