If you watched our video on the Pimoroni Unicorn HAT HD a little while back, or keep an eye on our Twitter feed, you’ll know that our features editor Rob was using the Unicorn HAT HD to count down to a forthcoming holiday. Now that’s been and gone, it’s time to replace it with something else and what better than a little festive add-on for the Christmas season?

The 3D Xmas Tree acts very much like a HAT for the Raspberry Pi, sitting neatly on top of the GPIO pins. However, it doesn’t cover the top of the Pi and, due to the ‘3D’ nature of the design, it also hangs off the edge. Still though, it’s neat to just slot on.

The £12 price is for the unsoldered version which you need to assemble yourself, but there is also a £15 ($20) version that comes pre-soldered. We’re always up for a bit of soldering, so were happy to get a soldering iron out when the unsoldered version arrived. However, due to the nature of the tree, it’s a little bit of a chore. 25 resistors and 25 LEDs need to be individually soldered to the board along with a 40-pin GPIO header and, while it’s perfectly fine and pretty easy, the repetition is noticeable. Still, we constructed the tree in about 45 minutes or so.

Programming the tree is a doddle and makes good use of the LED and LEDBoard classes in the GPIO Zero Python library on the Raspberry Pi rather than using its own dedicated software. The example code on The Pi Hut product page is enough to get you started and you can easily modify it to make your own little light routine with some quick tinkering.

We like this kit as it looks great once finished and it’s pretty customisable as well: don’t want all the main LEDs to be red? Remove them and add some multicoloured alternatives! For now, though, we’re just going to have the standard red LEDs flash at our desk while we work. Maybe next year.

Last word

4/5

A great little Pi-themed decoration that can fit almost anywhere you want it to. We suggest spending a bit more on the pre-soldered version, though.