Life & fun · December 24, 2016
Painting a Christmas Tree's LED Lights
Painting a Christmas Tree's LED Lights launched on December 24, 2016 with 54 votes, #1,293 of 3,449 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 9 years on.
In plain words
This project enables interactive control of WS2812B LED lights on a Christmas tree through a web interface. A user draws on an HTML5 canvas in their browser, and those brush strokes are transmitted via Flask and Socket.io to a Raspberry Pi Zero, which translates the positions into corresponding light colors on the tree. The system requires an initial calibration phase to map canvas coordinates to physical light locations. It is designed for hobbyists interested in creative lighting projects and interactive installations.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Based on the work I did last year using ws2812b lights . I created a very simple hack in order to enable the lights of a Christmas tree to be painted. I made use of Flask (a Python Web framework) along with the Flask socket.io library, in order to enable touch events from pressing a HTML5 canvas to be sent to my Pi Zero, which controls the setting of the lights. The position of the lights which are used by the web application, where obtained through a calibration phase which is documented in the above link. For some reason I’ve found these lights rather temperamental, with the first light in the chain occasionally breaking, despite using a capacitor to help protect against in-rush…from anfractuosity.com
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- WCWeb-controlled Christmas Lights with Node.js, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi2013 · gnewt.at · ▲51
Weekend Project: Web-controlled Christmas Lights with Node.js, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi
- AHA high-tech floating Christmas tree with more than 2000 RGB LED's2015 · maximise.dk · ▲94
Mini Christmas Trees with addressable LEDs and RP2040-based controller2022 · pixo.lighting · ▲44Hello HN, these Mini Trees have a custom circuit board with WS2812 addressable LEDs on one side and a controller using an RP2040 microcontroller on the other, all inside a CNC'd Foamex PVC case. They stand around 23cm (9") tall. The firmware is written in MicroPython, which can be modified or replaced. Power is provided via USB-C, which is also used for programming. There is also a web-based animation sequencer to create lighting sequences in time to arbitrary audio, examples of which are on the linked page. This is similar to xLights (https://xlights.org/), but much less…
Skia-canvas, a browserless implementation of the Canvas API for Node.js2020 · github.com · ▲187A multi-threaded, GPU-powered, 2D vector graphics environment for Node.js - samizdatco/skia-canvas
I connected my house lights to video games2016 · stavros.io · ▲127
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