We bought a lighted Christmas tree from Amazon that had RGB lights. It lasted a season before dying. This year I decided to make a Christmas tree topper for my wife as Christmas is her favorite holiday. It involved designing a small circuit board for the LEDs, reflowing the LEDs in a toaster oven, designing and printing the topper, writing code for an ESP32 to drive the LEDs, and creating a small website to easily control the lighted topper.
To start with, I wanted to use some new LEDs I hadn’t used before. The APA102 LEDs (also known as Dotstar) are a little more forgiving on timing than the standard Neopixel LED. I purchased the LEDs and a breakout board from Adafruit. Unfortunately I didn’t like the layout of the board as it had only one power and one ground connection which was not conducive to multiple LEDs as I’d have to share connections. I designed my own board with 4 connections on each side so I had power and ground in and power and g
After I had the boards designed and ordered I had to solder a bunch of LEDs. I decided the best way would be to use my reflow oven I made for Ben’s show, seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckcHyMxqesM&t I used a paste syringe to apply the solder, then ran it through the reflow oven. I had some failures to do with overheating the parts because my thermocouple setup inside the oven is not ideal. I will address that in the future so I don’t ruin anymore LEDs.