Hacking Christmas 2012: Christmas trees, wreaths, and 3D-printed cookies

Hackers celebrate Christmas too! Here’s a quick roundup of cool hacks we’ve seen around the Web that we feel are worth sharing on this wonderful 2012 Christmas Eve.

First up is a video of a very special Christmas tree called Wintertree. It goes up every year in Victoria, Canada, and is slowly becoming a holiday tradition.

Wintertree features over 800 lights that change color and dimness based on the sounds around it:

This is the fifth annual “Christmas Tree Light-Up.” The cherry tree is adorned with individually-addressable RGB LED Christmas lights. They are controlled by a system that analyzes sounds picked up by multiple microphones. You can read more about it at Times Colonist.

If trees aren’t your thing, maybe wreaths will do it for you. Dennis Adams’ wreath uses a string of individually-addressable LEDs. He laser cut his design from acrylic, and used ping-pong balls to diffuse the light. The best part is that Adams included the ability to monitor a Twitter feed with the wreath; a new tweet results in a different animation:

This hack uses a $25 Arduino and a $2,000 Macbook Pro that acts as its gateway to the Internet. A processing program uses the Cheerlights API to fetch the latest color, and sends it to the wreath as an RGB value. You can read more about it on Sector67.

Trees and wreaths are great ways to show your Christmas spirit, but neither of them is edible. 3D-printed cookies, however, are very much so:

The process may not be terribly efficient, but it is pretty accurate! Ralph Holleis is lucky enough to have access to a 3D printer, which he has hooked up to a syringe which is filled with cookie dough, which is squeezed out in a pattern. Holleis doesn’t have much information on his site but if you want more information, you can check out the Hack A Day post.

Have you seen any cool hacks this Christmas?

Image credit: John Nyberg