Every christmas for the last 10 years, there has been Soldering workshops at Bitraf, Norway’s largest Makerspace and Hackerspace. This is one of the most popular workshops every year, so we will do 2-3 of them. I’m one of the organizers and for many years we used a cheap, Chinese xmas tree kit for this. It’s a super kit with lots of soldering, so in just an evening you’ll build up the skills needed for handling the soldering iron, feeding the right amount of solder and you end up with a satisfying result that you can display on your desk.
In the second of the 2025 workshops, the kits failed completely. We tracked the problem down to a combination of faulty transistors and PCBs. On a transistor-chaser circuit, that’s pretty crucial. To prevent this from happening in the future, I decided to design my own version of this kit and sell it as a product here at Maketronics. The new kit solves the following problems from the Chinese kit:
- Only 112 solder points compared to 136 on the old kit, saves about half an hour of workshop duration
- It is close to impossible to assemble the kit incorrectly. Connecting the the parts is significantly easier due to smarter parts placement and better tolerances.
- All parts in the kit are verified before kitting
- The kit has no screws or mechanical parts
- USB Type C connector and required SMD resitors are presoldered
- LED symbols are placed on both sides of the PCB, making for a prettier tree
Assembling the two tree halves were one of the most annoying things to resolve during workshops, since the old kit made it possible to short GND and 5V if parts were incorrectly placed. This kit is using different size slots, so the parts only go in the correct way.
Peoples ambitions vary, so we also made a simpler kit for those that only want to do a little soldering. The Snowman kit comes with only 4 LEDs and 4 resistors, but it also has a presoldered microcontroller that will animate the LEDs. This kit will run from a coin cell for many years, only limited by the battery’s discharge rate. Both kits are now available from the Maketronics webshop.
As with most of our products, we offer schematics for both the snowman kit and the Christmas tree. Firmware for the snowman will also be available so you can change the animations.