For this year I wanted to add a personal touch to our Christmas tree and so I have started thinking about what features it should have. Lately I’ve been playing a lot with HomeAssistant and so the obvious path was to put an esp32 in there so that I could control it from the app. Next I thought about making it battery powered but considering I wanted to use at least 10 RGB LEDs and I also had the ESP32 in there which is kinda power hungry, the kind of battery needed to run the whole system for a decent amount of hours before needing a recharge would make the whole thing too heavy so I instead went with usb power because I always have a socket available at the bottom of the tree to power the tree lights so I could easily add a small 5V adapter and run a micro usb cable through the tree. So these were the main decisions I had to make regarding this project and the rest is just support circuitry.