In 1998, I was given a fibre optic christmas tree, lit by two coloured light bulbs powered by 2 x AA batteries. In the intervening years, the electrics broke. Finally today I got round to doing something about it.
The tree now has a bunch of neopixels where the bulbs used to be, and an ESP8266 microcontroller providing the flashing (as well as a Wifi/telnet accessible Lua command prompt).
Unfortunately, I can't see much of a different between the illumination provided by the seven pixels - I was hoping that each one would light the fibres up very differently, but that hasn't turned out to be the case. No big deal though, and maybe more optical isolation between the different LEDs and the base of the fibre bundle would help.
Interestingly, the fibres manage to project an image of the layout of the LEDs on the board (see link above) onto the wall behind the tree! and all the fibres emit a very slight blue light because there's a blue LED on the controller board.
