The GPIO Xmas Tree is something like that – and probably the easiest one to code yet! It’s also nice and small, sitting over six GPIO pins rather than taking up all 40. This way, you can add a little festive flair to your Raspberry Pi, while still working on other projects that require the use of some GPIO pins.

Easy coding

One of the unique things about this tree is that you can program it with Scratch! Scratch on Raspberry Pi has a built-in GPIO library, allowing you to code physical objects, including this tree’s five LEDs.

This is one of the few cases, though, where something so simple is much easier to do via Python, especially thanks to the GPIO Zero library, requiring less than ten lines of code to create a wonderful twinkling effect!

We quite adore this little tree – it’s cheap and cheerful and could be someone’s first Raspberry Pi project on Christmas morning, with a quick and very cool result.

Verdict

9/10

This fun little project will make your Raspberry Pi work desk festive, or make a young maker’s first steps at Christmas wonderful.