Christmas tree! Engineer style

Its the last weekend of november, and that means time for a Christmas tree. But, since I don't own one, I had to make one -- LED style!

First I laid out 27 LEDs in the shape of a tree. Didn't have all the same color or size, so had to be a bit mismatched. Also discovered that my camera does not like to autofocus on protoboard... must be all the little holes messing it up.

Step 2 was wiring. Each LED got two wires, one for cathode and one for anode. Tried to keep all the cathodes orange for distinguishing them later.

Third, I divided up the wires into rows and columns of the tree. This way I could individually address each LED in a logical manner. I used the Anodes for the columns and cathodes for rows.

Fourth I connected them to the digital pins 0-13 on my Arduino (I had 6 columns and 8 rows) and loaded some code from the Arduino Cookbook. Christmas is here!!!