Andrew Gale from Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire did some great little robot soldering kits for the CamJam in September. He’s now branching out (ha-ha… oh, wait… that joke doesn’t make sense yet) into Christmas trees (see… branching out? branch… Never mind). He’s just launched a short Kickstarter – a soldering kit in a Christmas tree shape with lots of blinkies. It only uses 4 GPIO pins to control 7 LEDs and it does this by charlieplexing. Charlieplexing is a programming method that… well… he’ll explain everything about it as the campaign progresses! Suffice to say if you look it up on Wikipedia it’ll scare the life out of you, but I’ve seen the code he’s using and it’s not so tricky! So, if you fancy a cute little Christmas decoration to sit on top of your Pi, or if you want to broaden your programming knowledge, back the campaign. Earlybirds get the kit for £5 and after that it’s £6. It’s all being done very quickly so is only available in the UK. Take a look at the campaign here. Andrew’s sent me one so I’ll be trying it out in the next couple of days and will probably blog about my experience with it.