Christmas Ornament SMD0603 — Joe Luciani

Every year, I go back and forth on whether to design and fabricate a custom holiday gift for friends, family, and coworkers. In 2020, I was firmly in the "no" camp. I was a new dad with a five-month-old daughter, Ava, and my free time was practically nonexistent. In fact, most of this project was completed late at night, keeping a close eye on the video baby monitor propped up right next to my soldering station. But per my usual habit, I mulled the idea over just long enough for it to become uncomfortably late, triggering my favorite kind of motivation: the rush of a high-pressure, time-crunched project.

That year, I wanted to lean into electronics with a self-imposed, slightly masochistic challenge: just how small of an LED could I physically solder by hand? The answer was the microscopic SMD0603. I sourced a variety pack of the tiny colored LEDs on Amazon and ordered a batch of 3/32” brass rod from McMaster-Carr to serve as the structural framework. The biggest hurdle wasn't the microscopic soldering itself, but fixturing the brass rod accurately. I initially over-engineered the solution, testing out 3D-printed jigs and even machining a custom 6061 aluminum fixture on the Haas mill. Ironically, the most effective method turned out to be completely analog. I printed my CAD drawing directly onto paper, covered it with strips of standard 3M double-sided tape, and laid it out across my silicone soldering mat. Using flush-cut pliers, I trimmed each brass segment to size and pressed it onto the tape. The adhesive held everything perfectly flat and aligned, allowing me to carefully apply flux and solder the joints together cleanly with my Hakko iron.

The resulting tree was a functional, structural circuit. The entire perimeter edge of the raw brass tree acted as the positive side, while a custom-bent piece of brass rod in the center established the negative side, holding a single CR2032 watch battery perfectly in place via mechanical tension. There was no on/off switch—the trees simply stayed illuminated in bright reds, greens, blues, and whites until you physically popped the battery out or it died completely. Despite the late start and the microscopic components, I managed to build 32 of these miniature glowing trees.