Musical LED Christmas Tree

Hello everybody. As Christmas is coming, I have decided to create a beautiful Christmas Tree with music!

It has a mix of THT components and also SMD components such as the LEDs that will light up to the music and some resistors. With this little cute tree you can level up your soldering game and at the same time you will have a little Christmas decoration to show to your friends or even have it on your desk at work as there is a little switch to turn music on and off.

It also makes a great Christmas gift for those people who love electronics. In this instructable, I'm going to show you how to make this beautiful tree with all the steps needed and I will also leave the link to my Tindie store if you want to purchase it as a gift.

Enjoy!

Here are all the components needed to build this cute little tree:

• 1 Green snowy tree PCB

• 1 piezo buzzer

• 1 IC Chip

• 1 SMD transistor

• 4 470Ω 0805 SMD resistors

• 1 4.7K 0805 SMD resistor

• 2 switches

• 1 CR2032 coin cell SMD holder

• 4 green 0805 SMD LED

• 4 red 0805 SMD LED

• 4 yellow 0805 SMD LED

• 2 curved headers

You can really use whichever LED colour you want but I personally prefer the multicoloured one as the resulting effect is more beautiful and look like a real-sized Christmas Tree

Here is the link to my Tindie store in case you want to buy it because it comes all together as a kit and it will be easier for you! https://www.tindie.com/products/21241/

Tools needed:

• Soldering iron

• Rosin core solder

• Tweezers

We are going to solder the LEDs, pay attention to the positive and negative sides of the LEDs. The green dot on the LEDs goes next to the letter on the PCB.

As I mentioned before, please pay attention to the letter on the PCB as G means green, R means Red, and Y means yellow, however, if you want to solder just one colour don't mind these letters ;)

Make sure to solder all the LEDs, there are 12 of them!

Now we are going to solder the resistors and the transistor. The resistors marked as R1-R4 on the PCB are 470Ω (471) resistors. The resistor marked R5 is a 4.7K (472) resistor. It doesn't matter which position you solder the resistors because they are not polarised. So come on!

Finally, solder the transistor marked as Q1 9012 on the PCB. This has a predetermined position, it is easy!

To solder the IC, please follow the silkscreen on the PCB to correctly solder it in place. The little dent on the IC needs to match the one with the silkscreen.

After this, solder the two switchers, again, the position doesn't matter.

Now solder the battery holder, pay attention to the direction of the battery holder, simply follow the photo!

Now we are going to solder the buzzer, the positive leg (marked on the top of the buzzer) goes into the square pad. This little "speaker" is going to deliver some cute Christmas music!

In this step, we are going to solder the headers to finally put the three together. Try to solder these headers as vertical as possible if we want our little tree to stand perfectly. It isn't very difficult, don't worry! The short legs go in the small PCBs while the long legs are going to be soldered to the main PCB in the next step

Insert the long legs of the headers to the main PCB and solder them. This step is a bit tricky but not difficult, you might need a third hand to hold the pats so they don't move!

Make sure to solder the two parts as vertical as possible because these are going to help the tree stand on itself!

You have finished assembling this cute little tree!

Now you just need two CR2032 coin cell batteries to power it up. Insert them in the battery holder, flip the lower switch to turn the LEDs on and if you want to enjoy some Christmas music just flip the other switch!

You can enjoy this Christmas tree with or without music but either way, it will look very cute and you will be able to show everyone what you made and that you really really love Christmas!

I hope you liked this instructable as much as I liked writing it and making the boards. If you liked it, please don't forget to vote me on the Battery Powered contest and I wish you a Merry Christmas!