Looking around I realized I have collected quite a lot of Pi Xmas trees over the years. Clearly setting them up individually would take quite a lot of Pi’s, but could I get them all working from a single Pi ?

It was immediately apparent some sort of fiddling would be needed as the Pi 3d tree on it’s own uses all the available IO !

Accepting this would be viewed from the front I was able to save a number of IO lines by ignoring the leds on the back of the 3d tree. This still left me short by about 8 lines so I added an MCP23017 I2C port expander to give to make up the difference.

As you can see the result is not pretty but it works, albeit with a little blue-tack and packing tape holding things together.

This was also an opportunity to use the RasPiO Breaboard Pi Bridge, with all the IO broken out in numerical order this really helped me keep my sanity.

Anyway happy Christmas from MeanderingPi