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.
10″ subs + my pc’s cold cathodes + this =
really obnoxious and definitely illegal car under lighting.
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.
This needs to be combined with the hack below :)
Sound activated smell and lights in the bathroom.
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…
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.)
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.
can someone recommend me a book or something to learn about this stuff?
Man this looks fun. Just remember the wires in a computer aren’t really designed for this kind of amperage.
I think rather than use that “outlet adapter” since you’re already cutting up and extension chord just cut one of the wires, run it through the relay, leave the other one alone. Plug the male end into the wall and plug your christmas lights in the female end. Less parts, slightly less work, and no sketchy 24 gauge wire for your christmas lights. Most of those two prong extension cables have 2 or 3 female plugs so you can plug in more than one string of lights.