Sound activated christmas lights

posted Dec 2nd 2008 11:53am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: home hacks, peripherals hacks

speaker_lights

Christmas is coming up pretty quickly. [tinkernut] shows us how to do a quick and dirty music activated Christmas light setup. Simply crack open a pair of old computer speakers and wire the speaker leads to a relay. Use that to power an outlet and you have music controlled lights. The section at the beginning of the video is a bit misleading as that kind of choreography would be rather difficult with this setup. This may look familiar as we mentioned an almost identical project back in 2006.

Comments [8]

tagged: audio activated, christmas lights, sound activated

8 Responses to Sound activated christmas lights

J says:

December 2, 2008 at 1:19 pm

10″ subs + my pc’s cold cathodes + this =

really obnoxious and definitely illegal car under lighting.

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andrew says:

December 2, 2008 at 2:19 pm

i would _never_ use wire that thin for mains power.

now i know someone’s going to say “but if the lights use x many watts, then u only need wire thats blah blah blah gauge”. still, safety first.

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Roy van Rijn says:

December 2, 2008 at 2:34 pm

This needs to be combined with the hack below :)

Sound activated smell and lights in the bathroom.

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theweirdness says:

December 2, 2008 at 2:45 pm

yeah, the gauge of that wire kinda frightens me, (well the whole project kinda gives me the willies) but it is a quick and dirty hack that has some semi decent results, lets pray to god this guy does not plan on chaining together 10 more strands to this circuit…

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atrain says:

December 2, 2008 at 3:45 pm

Other than the scarily thin wire he’s using for mains, another thing missing from this project is a fuse…

I have a setup like this running off my computer (via parallel) right now. Using palace-dci software that runs different relays based on frequency, resulting cool displays (different lights flashing differently to the music). Though, I haven’t upgraded to SSRs yet so its loud as hell.

I’m looking into porting Palace to jack, but don’t know jack ;) about linux audio devel. Doesn’t look too hard if anybody wants to give it a go. (I’m riddled w/exams so don’t have much time right now.)

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Morden says:

December 3, 2008 at 5:31 am

Christmas lights are required to have fuses in the plug. If you are talking about a pre-relay fuse then yeah, it’s missing. But the circuit has one built in with the lights.

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Malbiz says:

December 9, 2008 at 9:19 am

can someone recommend me a book or something to learn about this stuff?

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pappa-bear says:

October 13, 2010 at 6:21 pm

Man this looks fun. Just remember the wires in a computer aren’t really designed for this kind of amperage.

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