Category Archives: Holiday Hacks

Animated EV Charge Cable Enlightens Us

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[ch00f] was searching for an idea to build for his father this Christmas, and cast his gaze across those novelty phone charging cables that have “flowing” LEDs along their length. Not one to stick to the small scale, he set out to create a flowing LED effect for a Tesla EV charger.

The basic components behind the build are a current transformer, a NeoPixel LED strip, and an ATtiny44 to run the show. But the quality of the build is where [ch00f]’s project really shines. The writeup is top notch — [ch00f] goes to great lengths showing every detail of …read more

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Make Mulled Wine With A Processor Heatsink!

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Now, over the holiday season there seems to be a predilection towards making merry and bright. As many an engineer and otherwise are sure to note, fine alcohols will facilitate this process. One such warm holiday beverage is mulled wine; there are many traditions on how to make it, but a singular approach to preparing the beverage would be to re-purpose an old PC and a CPU liquid cooling unit into a mulled wine heating station.

Four years ago, [Adam] found himself staring at a pile of mostly obsolete PCs in his IT office and pondering how they could be …read more

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Make Mulled Wine With A Processor Heatsink!

Posted on by

Now, over the holiday season there seems to be a predilection towards making merry and bright. As many an engineer and otherwise are sure to note, fine alcohols will facilitate this process. One such warm holiday beverage is mulled wine; there are many traditions on how to make it, but a singular approach to preparing the beverage would be to re-purpose an old PC and a CPU liquid cooling unit into a mulled wine heating station.

Four years ago, [Adam] found himself staring at a pile of mostly obsolete PCs in his IT office and pondering how they could be …read more

Continue reading Make Mulled Wine With A Processor Heatsink!→

Ceiling Tiles Give it Up for Christmas LED Ornaments

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The great thing about holidays is that they always seem to require some shiny things. The modern version of shiny things seems to be LEDs and advances in technology being what they are, we now have amazing programmable LEDs. And programmable LEDs mean animated shiny things! Years ago, [wpqrek] made an LED ornament using discrete components. This year he revisited his ornament and decided to make a new, animated, RGB ornament.

[Wpqrek]’s build is based around five WS2812b strips connected to an Arduino Pro Mini. The ornament itself is a thick styrofoam ceiling tile cut into a star shape with …read more

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These Ornaments Measure Christmas Cheer

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The ornament projects we post around here tend to be simple, stand-alone projects. We are, however, well into the era of the Internet of Things (like it or not) and holiday ornaments need not be single, unconnected blinking objects. For Christmas this year, [Sean Hodgins]  came up with some connected DIY ornaments that respond to Christmas cheer.

[Sean Hodgins] had some beautiful PCBs done up in festive shapes and he hand-pastes and oven-solders the SMD components on both sides. Each one is battery powered and controlled by an ESP8266. LEDs and a button on the front of each ornament comprise …read more

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A Menorah For The 21st Century

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For those new and experienced, this time of year is a great chance for enterprising makers to apply their skills to create unique gifts and decorations for family and friends. [Mike Diamond] of What I Made Today built a phone controlled, light-up menorah. It’s a charming way to display some home automation know-how during the holidays.

Expanding on his previous project — a pocket-sized menorah — a Raspberry Pi Zero with a WiFi dongle, some LEDs, wire, and tea lights suffice for the materials, while setting-up Blynk on the Raspberry Pi and a phone to control the lights ties it …read more

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3D Printed Greeting Cards

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T’is the season to hack, and the maker brigade won’t disappoint — there’s no better way to crank out a few cute holiday tchotchkes than to fire up the 3D printer. [Niklas Roy] has released gDraw, a software package that creates G-code to print out 2D drawings on your 3D printer.

The interface is simple, allowing the quick and easy creation of basic vector drawings. The program then converts the paths in the drawing to a G-code representation that your printer follows to squirt them out in plastic. Think of it as the 3D printed equivalent of the “Stroke Path” …read more

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Massive Pixel Display Holiday Decoration

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Decorating for the holidays is serious business! Finding themselves surrounded by neighbours who go big, redditor [wolfdoom] decided that this was the year to make a strong showing, and decided to build an oversized pixel LED display.

Demonstrating resourcefulness in their craft, [wolfdoom] found an old fluorescent light grid pattern to prevent bleed from one pixel to the next. Reusing this grid saves many hours of precision-cutting MDF — to be substituted with many hours of cutting the plastic with decidedly more room for error. Attaching the resulting grid to a sheet of plywood, and 576(!) drilled holes later, the …read more

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Another Desktop LED Xmas Tree!

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We love it when someone takes inspiration from one of our posts and comes up with their own twist on it. [Matthew] liked one builds he saw on Hackaday so much, he built his own LED desktop Xmas tree!

[Matthew] was inspired by [designer2k2]’s DIY desktop Xmas tree that was posted in October. To get started, he found a set of concentric WS2812 rings over on Ali Express. The five rings total 93 LEDs, plus a single WS2812 for the top of the tree. He also got a laser cut tree model from Thingiverse and had it cut, combining the …read more

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Arduino Lighting Controller With Remote Twist

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The time for putting up festive lights all around your house is nigh, and this is a very popular time for those of us who use the holiday season as an excuse to buy a few WiFi chips and Arduinos to automate all of our decorations. The latest in this great tradition is [Real Time Logic]’s cloud-based Christmas light setup.

In order to give public access to the Christmas light setup, a ESP8266 WiFi Four Relay board was configured with NodeMCU. This allows for four channels for lights, which are controlled through the Light Controller Server software. Once this is …read more

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