Jumbo Tree Ornaments

One year I wanted to put some big RGB LED ornaments in a tree but all the commercial things I could find were opaque plastic and not nearly big enough. So I made some of my own that could plug directly into a Ren48LSD's outputs.

Materials

• Coroplast
• Hot glue
• Short 6" pieces of PVC
• Dumb RGB strips (the roll kind)
• An RJ45 breakout board

Shapes & Assembly

I Googled "3D geometric shapes" and found plenty of examples, some I could print out and cut out of coroplast, then hot glue together. For example, here's a cube that's one piece of corplast; scored, folded and glued together it made for a nice box for testing the concept.

Since all I had was scrap coroplast and no really large pieces, most of the shapes required cutting out individual pieces for a shape and hot gluing them together at the seams. It was a tedious process but it worked -- and I got rid of a lot of loose pieces of coroplast that weren't much good for anything, such as these two:

For illumination, four short RGB strips were zip-tied to a 6" piece of PVC. The connection wires were then brought together and soldered to a home-etched RJ45 breakout board; +5v to pin 1, reds to pin2, greens to pin 4 and blues to pin 6, following the Ren48LSD's output design. The extra wire was simply coiled around the pipe, allowing for plenty of adjustments afterward.

Then the PVC was simply hot-glued to the bottom of the nearly-completed ornament and allowed to set up. A square hole would be cut into the ornament's last panel and the RJ45 jack hot glued to it from the inside, making for a highly water-resistant design.

Five basic shapes were made; some shapes were duplicated.

Some reflective stickers were added to the sides to provide more interest and also reflect other lights when the ornaments were not lit. The ornaments were very light weight and were suspended in the tree by the cat5 power wires!