A Fireplace for Christmas

What do you do when you want to hang your stockings up on the fireplace but you don’t have one? The answer is simple, you build one! This is what was asked of me by my sister as she wanted a fireplace to decorate her collage apartment.

This project started off will a roll of paper bricks and the idea to use a cardboard box to make a fireplace. Using a large, flat box I first started by cutting out an opening for where the fire would reside. After the opening was cut, I started to lay the brick sheet onto the box securing it using hot glue.

Once the box was wrapped in the paper, I cut the paper around two inches in from the inside of the box opening. I then cut each corner at a 45 degree angle allowing each side to be independent from each other. Then using more hot glue I folded the paper around the inside lip of the box for a nice clean look.

With the opening cut I used the rest of the paper brick to line the inside of the box. This would give the look of a chimney.

Using the cardboard left over from the opening, I drew out a fire grate and then cut it out. Once I was happy with how it looked I then attached black paper using hot glue and cut the paper to fit the cardboard. When that was done I had the basic setup needed for a fireplace, but it was still missing the more important (to me) part. The fire.

For the fire I decided to use a Adafruit Trinket and a NeoPixel ring to give off a fire flickering effect. I started off getting a 9 volt wall power adapter I hand laying around and a DC to DC 5v converter. The converter was use in order to avoid taxing the Trinket’s on board voltage regulator in driving the NeoPixel ring. This was mounted inside of a project box along with the Trinket and the NeoPixel ring on top. I did this so I would have a fully contained unit that could be easily removed from the fireplace latter.

With the fire part of the fireplace taken care of, all that was left was to put in all together. I mounted the project box to the inside on the fireplace with some hot glue and made a whole in the bottom corner of the box for the power wire to come though. I then secured the fire grate to the rest of the box also with hot glue. Then the final part of the project from me was some paper, to help defuses the light and help give it a glowing ember look. After I was done with assembly my sister fished off the fireplace with some silver garland and fluff to make a mantle.

Now my sister is able to have a fireplace in her apartment for Christmas and can be stowed away the rest of the year.

Here is the Code:

Arduino, Arduino C, Hardware , , , ,

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