A number of years ago, my girlfriend at the time bought me a fiber optic christmas tree to cheer up my office.

Something similar to this one:

Amazon.com – 32 Inch Fiber Optic Christmas Tree with Stand

I loved the thing, but it had its problems: The thing wasn’t built to last. It had a cheap, noisy, hot motor, and a 10W halogen bulb that was prone to overheating. The bulb wasn’t exactly cheap to replace, either.

After last christmas, and the third or fourth bulb replacement, I decided I had enough.

I left the original wall wart and switch in the system, and scooped everything out. Replaced the noisy motor with a stepper, and the halogen with a 1W LED. Control the whole thing with an Arduino.

I’m using an off the shelf buck converter and a bridge rectifier to get 5V DC efficiently from the 12VAC wall wart.

LED running from a MOSFET:

Stepper and color wheel in place:

Here’s the whole thing running:

I’m pondering adding a wifi breakout to it, and make it reactive to network events.

The LED doesn’t have enough red in it, so I’ll probably replace it with a warmer one. Otherwise, this was a fun 2-hour hack.