Background

I wanted a blinking Christmas ornament as a gift, so I decided to make one! I needed a low power, small Arduino that had a built-in on/off switch and was easily powered by an LiPo battery.

Components

With a built-in power switch, a JST battery plug and Arduino compatible microcontroller, the Adafruit Gemma fit the bill. Also for under ten bucks it’s not bad, especially when I’m supporting Adafruit and all of their contributions to the open source community. For the LED, I picked up a NeoPixel Ring and Jewel.

• 1x Adafruit Gemma
• 1x NeoPixel Ring
• 1x NeoPixel Jewel
• 1x 1200 mAh LiPo battery

Wiring

I used Fritzing to quickly generate a wiring diagram. Fritzing is free and open source. To use the free version, download the app from their github site. To include the adafruit parts, I needed to get the Adafruit Frtzing library here.

Code

gist:OneGneissGuy/52e9d41ed97531e8dc00125e3c6cdd48#xmas_ornament.ino

Next

While this project makes a fun and lovely Christmas ornament, it doesn’t have to sit in the ornament bin collecting dust all year. It’s a versatile project that can be used for each and every holiday, just experiment with the NeoPixel colors and patterning to fit the occasion!