“I pre-ordered the soldering kit as I enjoy constructing things. The kit, when it arrived appeared to be well manufactured. I found the assembly instructions easy to follow and soon had the components soldered and the tree assembled. I copied and pasted the program supplied and soon had the tree sparkling in all it's glory. My 10 year old grandson was mildly impressed, but it takes a lot to really impress him, then he asked if it had any more programs ! It's something I'll have to work on.”
“Never tried programming anything with a pi always used other stuff so bought this so I can look at doing this with my son. We had control of it using scratch and have now written some stuff in python and get can it to do what we want which is nice.
Our white LED never lit, we checked the polarity etc and all was OK, voltage on pads but no light. Our kit came with an extra red so we swapped this out and it worked but we liked the idea of the white one and then thought about having different coloured lights in the tree so I ordered some different coloured LEDs (not from here). We have tried these today and the greens and yellows work but it seems my tree is not giving enough power for the whites and blues to light. I think this may have been the issue with the original white as I have since found that whites and blues do require a higher voltage from https://www.petervis.com/electronics/led/led-resistor-calculator.html so expect I will need to swap a few resistors out or stick with three colours. I'm just a bit puzzled now as to how the white star was ever supposed to light as I only get 1.8v here which is not enough to light it but no-one else seems to be having this issue.”
“I enjoyed building it and making it light up. I did think it would be great to use the 25 LEDs in a different way. I have created a small script that lights up the same number of LEDs as the days in December, where in Christmas Day the Star lights up. Have a look:
https://wijman.net/confluence/display/LIN/Pi+Hut+3D+Christmas+Tree+Script”
“I bought two of these (the soldering kind) one for myself and one for my daughter, to give her some experience with soldering, and both of us more experience with python. 154 soldered spots each later (194 including the headers we soldered onto our pi zeros), our first objective is definitely achieved. The provided sample code was sufficient to test our soldering work (amazingly, all OK), but for anything more I needed the gpiozero library's online documentation. One annoyance - the numbers on the pcb near each LED aren't simply the Broadcom/GPIO numbers, or even the physical PIN numbers, but some other sequence of numbers. I worked out the equivalences, but couldn't you have used the GPIO numbers as required by the code? It would then be much easier to turn on a specific led.”
“I compiled the kit with my 14y old kid. This was the first time for him to solder the parts onto the pcb, so I demonstrated how it is done by soldering half of them and left the other half for him to finish. This was fun and almost flawless process, involving the occasional use of the solder remover wick. One small issue though with the top star led. In the instructions it is written to place the led on the same side as the resistors, but the opposite side has the "+" and "-" signs where the solder should go, so the soldering is somewhat trickier and connection may not come out at its premium. The good bare copper is actually on the resistors side, almost as offering to solder the led on the back side of the tree.”
