We had a white Christmas in Komenda this year, even though the weather outside was sunny. Some (over 1000) leds, some AVR control with TLC5925 led controllers and we had a nice snow animation that could be changed to show stars arranged in real constellations. The clouds are made from 5mm white plexiglass and illuminated with leds from begind.

I have been etching my own PCBs for almost 10 years now, but now has come a time, when China is so fast and cheap that making your own PCB just does not make sense. Here in Slovenia material is more expensive than pcbs from www.allpcb.com including fast DHL shipping. They practically give 5x5cm PCBs away for free ($5.00).

I started this project with simulation in PyGame, just to see what spacing of LEDs is required to make a convincing snow animation. This is a super nice way to verify the design, and the code is a good base for the actual AVR code.

The leds for the snow are arranged in 12x8 grid on a 25x20cm PCBs. They are controlled with TLC5925 and multiplexed in 6 groups. The pcbs can be stacked for different snow fall lengths. The whole assembly has 10 PCBs with 960 leds. Each snowfall under each cloud is controlled by a separate ATTINY841. For the other stars that do not fall on the snow grids I reused the controller from my previous Project nativity scene 2014. The cloud illumination LEDs are connected to 12V 3 in series with a resistor and controlled by a MOSFET.

All controller boards are interconnected with ethernet cables that carry +5V and +12V and UART for communication. The sequence is controlled by a separated AVR with 2 switches that sends UART commands.

All files are on Github: https://github.com/domenipavec/avr-snow