After playing around with a custom DEF CON badge, I wanted to do another electronics project just for fun. What better time to share electronics with others than Christmas? So I decided to do a custom ornament for friends and family.

Though it shared some characteristics with my DEF CON badge (blinken lights, battery powered, etc.), the similarities ended there. In this case I want something lightweight (it’s going on a tree branch), simple (the XXV badges took a long time to assemble by hand), and that could run off a coin cell battery for days.

Not being the most artistic of individuals, I went with a simple snowflake design and 6 LEDs at the points. At first, I wanted to do white LEDs, but since they have a forward voltage around 3.2V, that wouldn’t work well with a single 3V coin cell, so I settled for 1.8V Red LEDs. (The battery will be unable to produce much current at all long before it reaches 1.8V.)

The ornament base is a red soldermask PCB with gold-plated (ENIG) copper. The boards were produced at Elecrow and I hand assembled the parts. The microcontroller is the ATTiny2313A, chosen both for low power consumption and low cost. (Driving 6 LEDs doesn’t take much in the way of CPU.) I chose not to use the ATTiny25/45/85 series because I didn’t want to deal with multiplexing pins to drive the LEDs and in-circuit programming (ICSP) header.

The schematic is pretty straight forward. There’s a battery holder and a couple of power supply capacitors (due to PWM of the lights, I didn’t want the input voltage bouncing around too much), the microcontroller, a single resistor network, and the 6 LEDs which are on the front of the board. The full bill of materials includes:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Label Description --------------------------------------------------------------- BT1 20mm SMD Coin Cell Holder C1 0.1uF Ceramic Capacitor (0805) C2 10uF Ceramic Capacitor (0805) U1 ATTiny2313A (QFN20) RN1 Resistor Network, 8 Independent, 100 Ohm Each D1-D6 Red SMD LED (0805) J1 2x3 Header, SMD, 2.54mm Spacing (AVR ICSP)

On the actual ornaments, the ICSP header is unpopulated – I manually held a connector to it to program each one. I left the connector in a standard format instead of a pogo pin arrangement in case any of my recipients wanted to hack on the firmware. (Since it’s Open Source.)

It was a fun little project and I’m already considering how I can improve for a new one next year. Full schematics, design files, and source code are on Github.