Gikfun 3D USB Christmas Trees 3 Colors LED DIY Kit Flash LED Circuit EK1719

I bought this kit knowing that the instructions were lacking so I’m not taking any stars away for that. It comes with only a wiring diagram which to me might as well have been hieroglyphics. I found a tutorial on hackaday.io that was adequate to get this thing put together. I did make a few mistakes though…I thought this was an excellent kit to practice soldering on. I had only ever tried to adjust solder joints in the past with limited success but had the soldering iron so figured I’d give this a try. I found it somewhat relaxing but you may not get the same from it, the parts are small and figidity for sure.My first mistake was not leaving enough of one of the capacitor leads to bend it down. I also installed that particular capacitor backward so the green and yellow lights on that board don’t light up as bright as the others. I plan to fix the mixed up polarity however won’t be able to fix the short leads without replacing the capacitor with a new unit with full length leads. You can see the correctly installed capacitors outlined in yellow in the photo I’ve included. The capacitor with the arrow pointing to it is the one that can’t be bent down and if you look closely at the markings on the can and the board you can see it’s installed backward.My second mistake was soldering the switch and power supply outlet to the wrong side of the bottom board. This took about thirty minutes to desolder with a pump and a lot of patience (this would have been much easier with copper braided wick). Once the two pieces were out it was easy to solder it into the correct location.In the end I learned some about soldering like mistakes can be recovered from, don’t touch your soldering iron or you’ll get a 3rd degree burn, and keep your soldering iron tip clean… I also got a neat desk decoration that people seem to be curious about.

This was a fun project, but not the easiest to put together due to bad instructions. Resistor values were either wrong or not included at all, so it was tricky to put together. The good news though is that all of the components are good quality. The circuit board is very solid, none of the pads showed any sign of lifting. The red LEDs could use to be a bit brighter, but they are decent.Both the battery and USB power supplies worked well.Bottom line: This is a good kit, but I would not recommend it for a first-timer due to the lack of quality instructions.

The wiring schematic is in Chinese, and there are missing resistor values. I had to take advice from another reviewer, but my green Diodes are really dim. Would have given this five stars if the resistors were labeled in the diagram and if the rest of the diagram was English

While assembly is relatively simple, the LED's are poorly formed to show polarity. Instructions in English would be handy, but it was kind of fun looking up the chinese characters for colors so I could get the right LED color on the correct circuit with its associated resistor.It's really well designed! A real plus is when you plug it into the USB power supply, it cuts off the batteries.

This is garbage. The directions are in Chinese, and there isn’t an English version. There isn’t even a diagram to follow. Do not purchase this, it is poorly developed and comes completely unassembled, all of the parts came in a bag and there is no way to assemble it.

I love the product itself but for a first time solder rookie this came with NO INSTRUCTIONS!!!!!!!!!!!! I had to travel hours and hours of u-tube video's to even get something somewhat close so that I could at least try to build it. What should have taken two hours took me two weeks because I had no idea on the resistor values being placed in the exact locations. I always believe in second chances on some things and I would give this product a second chance for them to improve but next time it better come with INSTRUCTIONS or I will never buy from this company again!!!

JUST ! WORD OF CAUTION TO BUYERS...I have bought several of this trees sold by gikfun This tree is the 3 color tree and they sell the same tree with multi colored lights the parts in the two kits will be different every time ,. Like the Resistors ,Capacitors Ect ... And the Instructions are very very hard to follow...And they don't always come with the correct parts as Shown in videos and Instructions,. U Tube has videos on this product if you want to search for them ....

I bought both versions of the tree sold by this supplier. I have over 45 years in electronics and have built countless kits. The board quality is excellent. Basically there are no instructions. Just a schematic . Both kits had missing resistor values according to the schematic.They will work with supplied components. My experimenting found 10K best for R1,R3,R5. 1k for R2,R4,R6. I used 2K for R7 on both units.They both perform very well when completed. Make sure you install the LEDs with about 1/4 "spacing off the board so they may be bent 90 degrees.Also insure the little flat on the LED body is positioned up so its operated with the correct polarity. The is a little better schematic on the web site mentioned on Amazon.

Quality good but the instructions are terrible fine if you have good electronics knowledge but useless if you do not