Mini Trees

I finally settled on a design for the 6 minitrees for this year's display.

I found some 750mm steel wire plant trainers from bunnings which would make a good minitree. Three of these cable tied together forms a single tree. Needless to say, finding 18 of these was difficult and has involved trips to at least 6 different Bunnings stores.

I had planned to use a string of 100RGB lights on each mini tree. I also wrapped each tree in some bird-mesh to try and hold the lights in place. It was apparent after wrapping the tree that the lights were a little "sparse" and it was also difficult to ensure each LED was pointing in the right direction.

As an experiment, I wrapped the second tree in three strings of 200 LEDs (Red, White, Green). Both Erin and I agreed this looked much better, so the remainder of the trees will be wrapped like this.

Holdman Coro Star

I decided that we needed a large star to hang on our gable, so I adapted a star the Holdman family used on their display. Rather than use lights to outline the star, I constructed it from Coro instead and backlit it. The star consists of two stars - a larger tall star in the background with a smaller star in the foreground.

First, I enlarged an image of the star and printed it to span a number of A4 sheets (in portrait orientation - 6 high by 4 sheets wide).

Next, I cut out the Coro shape and marked the star's outline onto the coro cutout. I then glued vertical "walls" along the outline to form individual light boxes for each section of the star. The height of the walls is approx 80mm. The outside surfaces of the star were painted black.

The picture below shows the almost finished star.

Within each section a number of RGB LED modules were glued (depending on the section, the number ranged from 2 (left and right sections) to 11 (middle star section).

The LED modules in the sections which form the tall "background" star are connected in parallel so they can all be triggered by a single source. The middle star is a separate source and can be switched independently of the background star. Since they are RGB modules, a total of 6 channels is required on a controller. My controllers are semi-centralised so there are no onboard controllers on the star.

To diffuse the light, a coro "lid" was formed and will be glued onto the star. It turns out that the 80mm height of the "walls" was a little too high and resulted in the light being too dim. I had to position each of the LED modules on small coro "blocks" (each 10mm high) to get a better effect.


The finished product is below.