We’re well into the holiday season, and makers in the Raspberry Pi community are already making some beautiful holiday projects. Today we’ve got an amazing project to share from maker and developer Omantn. Using our favorite SBC, the Raspberry Pi, he’s created a way to automate his wife’s model Christmas village.
According to Omantn, his wife has collected models for this Christmas village for a long time but never had a dedicated place to display them. So instead of fighting with cables and leaving them on a shelf, Omantn went the extra mile and created a Pi-powered solution. The project is built around a custom table with a system underneath that controls the lighting for the model’s LEDs.
In addition to automating the electronics, Omantn developed a custom web application that lets you control features in the village. The web app is hosted on the Pi and includes controls for the lighting and buttons for controlling the train and adjusting its speed. This web app can be accessed from anything with a browser, so PCs, tablets and smartphones will all work. It features a clean design with a lovely Christmas theme throughout.
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The whole operation is driven by a Raspberry Pi 4, but you could swap this out for a Raspberry Pi 3B if that’s all you have on hand. The Pi is connected to the LEDs using jumper wires and UL-certified jumpers. Proximity sensors are also included, with plans to integrate automated controls for lights triggered by the train as it moves through the village.
True to the holiday spirit of giving, Omantn opted to make the project open source. Users can check out the complete source code over at GitHub for anyone who wants to see how it goes together. According to Omantn, everything was programmed using Flask and Python.
If you want to recreate this Raspberry Pi project or develop something similar, head over to the thread shared on Reddit showing off the Christmas village and look through GitHub to see the inner workings of the code up close.