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Seasons Greetings! It seems a bit early for Christmas but this fun project needs to be done early to be ready for the festive period. This little project is one that I did over a weekend with my kids. I asked my young son what project he wanted to do for this Christmas and he had some pretty wild ideas about an electronic Christmas decorations, mostly involving flashing lights, music and a robotic Santa’s sleigh, he had even done a really cool little schematic of what he wanted to build! After a bit of negotiation we decided to leave the robotic Santa’s sleigh for next year and go for the advent calendar with flashing lights and music. There’s 24 coloured LED’s that represent the 24 days of advent and a big white LED in a star to represent Christmas day. When you press the button each day it increments the next coloured LED until you get to Christmas Day. When you press the button on Christmas Day it cascades all the coloured LED’s off, makes the big white LED flash and then play Jingle Bells.

The materials we used were:

- Plywood sheet 600mm x 400mm x 3mm.
- Arduino Mega 2560 (you need a Mega as you need 26 GPIO Pins).
- 6 x 5mm Red LED’s.
- 6 x 5mm Green LED’s.
- 6 x 5mm Blue LED’s.
- 6x 5mm Yellow LED’s.
- 1 x 10mm White LED.
- 25 x 300 ohm resistors.
- ISD 1760 Sound Playback Module
- Hookup Wire.
- 3W 8 Ohm Speaker
- 50 x 20mm nails (panel pin type).
- Spring return push button.
- 1 x 1K okm resistor.
- 1 x 4.7K ohm resistor.
- 1 x 1uF Capacitor.
- Hot Glue.
- Solder.

The tools we used were:
- Laser Cutter
- Soldering Iron
- Hammer
- Wire Cutters
- Wire Strippers”

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