It's Christmas! Time to Decorate our House!

I’ve been out for a couple of weeks and haven’t really visited the Internet, which means no blogging for me. It’s December 1, it’s Christmas season again! I’m pretty excited because this time of the year, we get to decorate the entire house! Lots of Santas and Elves coming our way!

We will decorate the house with some old and new decors. My wife bought these lights for our Christmas trees. We will also be decorating the house with mistletoes, poinsettias and ribbon decorations. These are all my wife’s ideas.

As for me, I am preparing something for our Christmas decoration. I’ve found this guide about Christmas LED displays that shows various images, a perfect fit for a unique Christmas décor. The projects will be an 8x16 pixel array built with ATtiny861 microcontroller which can show images, like Santa images or even candles, it will be displayed in a window to provide eye catching displays to passersby.

The main component of the hardware is the ATtiny861 microcontroller which runs at 20MHz. In order for the microcontroller to dim the LEDs without any visible flickering, the speed should be fast enough. A vertical row of 16 LEDs are driven by each of the eight A6276 driver ICs from Allegro Microsystems. Since there is no internal regulator needed on the circuit board, a regulated 5V wall pack can be used to run the board.

A total of 128 LEDs is contained in the circuit which results to building up 3 boards. The mixture of blue and white LEDs are in the first board, all blue LEDs in the second board, and all white LEDs were built up in the third board. The white LED board went into a transparent enclosure while the blue LED board went into a semi-transparent blue enclosure. Near the center of the board is the huge block of DIP ICs which serve as the driver chips for LEDs.