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The best Christmas tree lights


N9WXU

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Every Christmas I always have some project that I want to do but then then time flies and I can't get it finished.  Last year, I decided to actually finish one project and I built the best Christmas lights ever. 

 

This was a quick and easy project that needed the following ingredients.

You will need multiple LED strings depending upon the size of your tree.

Here is 1 LED on the string:

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You can see the ribbon cable connecting them together.  Each LED is about 12mm in diameter.  The ribbon cable hides well, but perhaps one day I will paint the wire.

 

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One LED, the power supply and the Arduino are inside this box.  I used the first LED in the box to light the box and to strain relief the cable.  You can pass a USB cable inside if you want to reprogram it.  The box is a simple laser cut 6mm plywood box.  The HEX hole pattern was overkill and almost caused a fire in the laser!  Of course I have a laser cutter in my shop.  Everyone should have one.

Currently I am simply running the demo code which cycles through a number of animations.  One day I plan to add a DMX software in the arduino and a raspberry pi as the controller.  Then I can be lazy and write code on the couch via WiFi to change the animations.

 

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Oh wow that is so cool! 

I am so doing that next year! So that is 150 WS2811 LED’s each individually controllable and we can make them flash in any pattern we want. ..

Wonder how hard it would be to hook a FFT on a mic up to that and making it follow a beat?

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