Damien LaRocque

#Open Source

Christmas Tree PCB

· 2min · Damien LaRocque
A rendering of the PCB, in KiCad.

Towards the end of 2023, in preparation for the holidays, I designed and soldered about twenty small Christmas tree 🎄 PCBs to give to my relatives. During this year's holidays, I took advantage of some free time to clean up and prepare the project to publish it as an open-source hardware project on GitHub.

Assembled PCB

About

This project taught me the basics of ATtiny microcontroller programming (via UPDI), PCB art, and SMD components soldering. I hope this project inspire anyone interested in #hardware, #embedded #programming, and #electronics. If you're interested in making one for next year, I wrote down all the tips and tricks for making your own Christmas tree PCB in an instruction guide.

This project was made with the following free and open-source software:

  • FreeCAD for the outline
  • Inkscape for the PCB art
  • KiCad for the design of the PCB
  • PlatformIO for embedded programming

Images

{ "images": [ { "src": "images/rendering.png", "title": "Rendering"}, { "src": "images/front.png", "title": "Front layer"}, { "src": "images/back.png", "title": "Back layer"}, { "src": "images/sketch.png", "title": "Tree Outline in FreeCAD"}, { "src": "images/pcb-layout.png", "title": "PCB layout in KiCAD"} ] }

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Christmas Tree PCB