Reinventing the Mini Tree
Christmas has always been my favourite time of year. Sunshine, a big lunch, and time spent with the people that are most important to us - perfect.
But last year, I decided it was time to start a new tradition.
Christmas Lights.
But not just any Christmas lights. I was inspired by this video
How It All Began
It started like most good projects do — with me falling down a YouTube rabbit hole.
After finding the video above, I stumbled across a few incredible Christmas light shows where tens of thousands of LEDs danced in sync with music, fireworks, and more.
Naturally, I wanted in.
After two weeks of research and convincing my parents to lend me their house as a test site, we built our very first display. It wasn’t huge, but it worked, and seeing the local community stop to watch it felt pretty special.
Fast forward a year, and things have escalated. A lot.
This season’s display will feature more pixels, more props, and a complete redesign of one of my favourite elements - The mini trees.
The Mini Tree
Mini trees are one of the simplest and most effective props in any light show.
Usually, they’re 2-3 feet tall, made from coroplast plastic, a mismatch of hardware store parts or an off the shelf kit.
They’re compact, add great depth to the display, and make it easy to create stunning effects that move across your yard.
Traditionally, they’re built with LED strings weaving up and down from the base to the topper, with lengths of wire joining each wire to the next. So that’s what I built last year.
My first attempt used a laser-cut plywood base and 3D-printed PETG toppers. It looked great for a while, but Australia’s summer had other plans.
By mid-December, the toppers were starting to melt and the plywood bases absorbed rain and warped in the heat.
Each tree needed 84 individual solder joints to connect the strings together in a zig-zag pattern. It worked, but it took forever to build and introduced dozens of potential failure points.
So, this year’s trees needed to be much better.
The New Design
The biggest change was moving away from wood and plastics that couldn’t handle the weather, and of course, solving my wiring headaches.
The new trees use a PCB for both the base and topper — sturdy, weatherproof, and able to carry power and data directly through copper traces instead of relying on wire-to-wire joins.
The base PCB. with the snap-free topper still connected
The PCB has slots in the outside edge to receive the addressable pixel strings. The string goes over the edge and through the PCB, so that the force exerted on the string while tensioning is on the insulation rather than the solder joints.
The centre post is still an irrigation riser (because they’re cheap, strong, and easy to find), but it now threads into ASA-printed mounts that can take the summer heat without softening, and connect the PCB’s to the riser.
The new ASA top and bottom prints with internal threads for the riser
I’ve also added a built-in tensioning system that lets me tighten or loosen the LED strings over time using the threads of the riser.
It’s a cleaner, faster, and much more durable design that should last many seasons without a single melted part.
Build Your Own
If you want to try it yourself, I’ve made everything as accessible as possible. There is a kit available below, and all the prints are available on Printables.
The trees only need some basic soldering skills, and I’ve put together a step-by-step build tutorial over on our second channel, The Saucepan.
You can wire the input and output pads to any kind of controller you’d like. Even a $20 WLED controller like the one I used in this video would do the job fine, and leave you with s nice standalone decoration.
If you’d like to get your own Mini Tree kit, we’ve also put together a limited run available through The Stock Pot Store.
There’s only one production run before Christmas, and a limited amount of kits with prints, so if you want to add some pixel magic to your yard this year, get in quick!
What’s Next
These trees are just the beginning.
They look cleaner, are easier to assemble, and will be a big part of this year’s expanded display — but there’s also a much bigger project in the works.
Let’s just say… the “mega tree” name finally makes sense.
Stay tuned on YouTube to see it all come together.