How many more sleeps? 🎄

Advent Calendar

The Raspberry Pi Pico 2W just came out today. We got one a few days ago, courtesy of the nice people at The Foundation.

It gave us a good excuse and just enough time to make a Christmas decoration that we never knew we needed. All our code, 3d parts etc are in our GitHub Repository. Here’s a video of how we made it:

Bonus Feature

There’s a lot of year when it isn’t advent, so with that in mind, We gave it some smarts for those days too. With a bit of back-of-the-envelope mathing (yeah, the brackets on t should be square) we came up with a brightness function that would periodically spread out, getting dimmer as it did:

OK, maybe that is a bit too much detail, but here is what it looks like in action:

So next time you hear someone say ‘what use is trigonometry?’ you can reply ‘it comes in handy when making novelty lamps that calm you down, so there’ at which point you flounce off triumphantly. I’m pretty sure that will make you look really cool.