Velleman MK100 Electronic Christmas Tree

Item as described. Arrived before projected date. Nice little ornament for Christmas.

I've been assembling and giving these away for many years. You can get two weeks operation on a quality battery.

I saw this at a local Maker's Faire. They said it was a kit, where you solder it together. I love Christmas, and I decided to give it a shot. Hey, it's only like $10 or so, what do I have to lose?I'm not much of an solder-er, but after I got THIN solder wire and some pointers from a guy a work who did a lot of circuit board work things went pretty good.The instructions are on the box and require paying attention to detail, particularly to which leads are longer (indicating polarity) and the colors on the resistors. My 8 yr old son desperately wanted to help, but I there's enough detail that he'd need my help...I couldn't just turn him loose...especially with a soldering iron.I got it together; it probably took me two hours start to finish. I like it a lot...just wished I would have bought the 3D Christmas Tree (Velleman MK130) instead. The 3D effect is what I really wanted, but no one's fault on that but my own. It looks great when it's done. It will go on my desk at work. Just cute flashing lights in various patterns with no sounds to annoy anyone.

I didn't have much problem putting this kit together. However, it didn't work at first and I had to troubleshoot the cause. The cause was due to three lifted pads, two on the transistors and one on a resistor, that prevented the thing from working. I was only using a 20 Watt soldering iron, so I was kind of surprised to find three lifted pads. However, this is a Vellemann kit which are simple and cheap, so only three is pretty good, I guess. Like all Vellemann kits, it's a great way to teach soldering for children and if they mess it up, oh well, just buy another one. And a cheesy blinking christmas tree is just the thing for lazy people who don't like to put up christmas trees.Four stars for the lifted pads.

This is a great little project. I've built three of these. The first two worked great upon completion. The third one had a faulty PCB (a short circuit underneath the film). Fortunately, the flaw was visible and I was able to use a hobby knife to cut through the flawed area and open the circuit. After that it worked great. I'm not an electronics expert, but with only a basic understanding it took me about 1-1.5 hours to complete.

Nice little kit. Very easy to assemble. I was a little surprised it only came with a single extra LED - given the cost of components you'd think throw in extra capacitors, resistors, etc in case someone makes a mistake. It'd also be nice if it included an on/off switch.Bought and assembled 2 for Christmas gifts, just purchased another to do as a project with my nephew over the holidays.

A common complaint I’ve. Read on these kits (made by other manufacturers) are the poorly written and hard to understand instructions... unless that is you understand Chinese. I haven’t started on this kit yet but after taking the pieces out and looking at it and the instructions, it looks pretty easy to do and really good quality.

I am in my twenties and wanted a quick project to help me learn how to solder before I swapped out the pickups in my guitar. This was an excellent kit for that purpose. It provided enough practice for me to go straight from this to my guitar with no problems. It was a little expensive for what it was, material wise, but well worth the knowledge and skill I was able to gain in such a short amount of time from building it.