A Hacker's Christmas Story

It was Christmas Eve, and because I decided to do everyone's presents myself this year, I'm still working like crazy to get everything done before the big deadline. Why am I doing this to myself? Well, partly because I like the process.

My wife had the idea that we could make fun decorative items for the elderly, and decided on a few designs. My son then drew them on paper, and I scanned those drawings and traced them in CAD. We then cut the wooden shapes on the CNC router, which turned out to be incredibly successful. (Now that I've done that, I wouldn't be surprised if all those "quirky" decorative items Swedish flat-packers sell weren't originally sketched by third-graders.)

Then my son painted them, and it's my job to insert the glitter. I bought some of these three wire "string lights" for this purpose, and they are really fun to hack. They're like the WS2812, only instead of using four pins and moving data downstream, they're on a bus, each with a hard-coded address - they know where they are in the chain and each LED doesn't only listens to the Nth set of 24 bits. That means sending 200 color codes just to light up the 4 LEDs on Aunt Micki's decorative tree, but so be it.

Last stop, and still to be done from the 23rd, route some kind of wooden battery box, wedge the LiPo and charging circuitry, and solder an on/off switch. It's up to the last minute, but isn't it always?

It would certainly have been easier to order something online. But is this the spirit of the gift? Nope! The DIY method brings the family together, gives me quality time with the CNC machine, and builds my FreeCAD skills. My son even watched over my shoulder as we coded some of the LED animations. And nothing says Christmas better than hand-coded winks.

Happy Holidays everyone!