What is it? The Christmas Ornament 2011 is a PCB with a battery and blinking lights. A small PIC microcontroller handles the actual blinking, and limits the LED duty cycle to control the apparent brightness. A button allows you to switch among a number of blinking modes, and off.

Where can I get the source code? Source code is available at our BitBucket repository, at http://code.surrealitylabs.com/christmasornament2011.

Where can I get one? You can’t, unfortunately - I made a batch of 100, of which most went into gift packages for a charity in Ottawa, Ontario. The rest went to my family.

You can, however, build up a batch of your own.

How do I build my own? This one’s a touch tricky, because it’s a surface mount board - and reasonably tiny ones at that (0603 parts). Hopefully I’ll do a writeup of that soon. A major practical component of getting these built is getting the PCBs done, which I did through Seeedstudio.

How does it work? I haven’t written that up, yet - hopefully soon.

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