My Christmas Tree This Year Was A Raspberry

While some of you may already know about our eco-friendly Christmas tree @raluca built the other day, I think none of you knows - yet - about my other Christmas tree.

A month ago I decided I'm going to spend some time with my 12 year old girl, but in a very different way from what we were already doing: I thought to introduce her to the magic world of micro-computing. You know the deal, Arduino, Raspberry and the whole gang.

And what better pretext for this than Christmas?

So, I shelved $15 from my hard earned STEEM stash, and bought a Raspberry Pi 3D Christmas tree from Pi Hut. I already had a spare Raspberry Pi Zero, so this was the perfect fit.

Here's how it looked in its initial package:

In the picture above there's also a small solar panel, but we realized we won't be able to use it - not too much light in the apartment where I live right now - so it didn't make it to the final project.

So, we started slow, but steady:

The resistor part was the most difficult, but we nailed it:

I will spare you the details of the other stages of the project (mostly because I don't have more photos of it, to be honest) but fact is, after 3 weekends of focused work, a new soldering gun and a lot of delegation - she is way better with the soldering gun than me, way more accurate - we finally finished it:

My favorite part is the white LED on top.

P.S. Some of the LEDs are actually lightning, if you're wondering, I just didn't plug the Raspi in for the last picture. And anyway, what really matters is not the final product, but how we felt building it and the time we spent together.

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.