RGBLED Christmas Tree Topper

When my wife and I were first dating, she bought me a transparent Christmas tree topper shaped like a star that had LEDs inside. When you switched the topper on, those LEDs would continuously strobe until its batteries died.

The concept was interesting but the LEDs were obnoxiously bright, the battery wasn’t user-serviceable, and you had to turn it on by hand! Like a caveman!

Shortly thereafter, I came across this model on Thingiverse, and figured I’d build one and hook WLED to it.

The Build

The LEDs are WS2811s, and they’re hooked to a QuinLED-Dig-Uno, with a nice long cable that makes it easy to hide the control box once it’s up in the tree.

Getting the individual strips of LEDs wired together in the center of the star was a bit tricky, but the rest of it came together pretty quickly. The LEDs are addressed in WLED so that its default behavior is to create radial patterns.

WLED has a straightforward API and a Hubitat driver, so hooking it to my smart home was quick and easy.