Music-synced Christmas Light Suit

December 14, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

Ah, the end of the 4th financial quarter – the magical time of increased sales, being at work the entire time the sun is up, and holiday parties. For [Andy] at National Instruments, though, things don’t seem too bad. He built a neat Christmas light suit to entertain everyone with his brilliant persona.

[Andy] always loves great Christmas light displays (he even blogs about them), so he figured a wearable light display synchronized with music would be very doable. The build is controlled with LabVIEW to convert .WAV files to power levels and frequency bands. This info is then piped into the Arduino that controls the lights.

[Andy] actually made two light suits, one for him and one for his friend [Richard]. Both guys have two light-up Christmas staffs to wield light mage powers on their coworkers. The lighsuits are controlled by Arduino/Xbee setups – one each for each suit and staff. The result is phenomenal, and should really get everyone in the holiday spirit.

GE Color Effects Hacking For The Nautically Inclined

December 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 7 Comments

ge-color-effects-controller

[Jim] wrote in to share some work he did with GE Color Effects LED lights in an effort to create a light display for his boat. He saw our coverage of the Color Effects G-35 hacking efforts by DeepDarc last year, and knew that they would be prefect for the boat. He did some careful scouring of eBay to score 8 strings of lights at bargain basement pricing, then he got down to the business of hacking them.

He originally built a control circuit using a single PIC18F, but just before he started to put everything together, he realized that wiring everything up would be a huge undertaking. Going back to the drawing board, he decided it would be best to replace the lights’ stock board with one of his own. Now, he uses a single master controller board to send messages to his slave “pods”, significantly cutting down the amount of wiring required for the project.

The display looks great as you can see in the video below, though as many do, [Jim] has plenty of improvements in mind for the future.

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Dimming AC Lights The Hard Way

December 12, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

It’s that time of year again where the thermometer drops, the sun sets earlier, and we try to warm our hearts with the solstice festival that is common in our own respective cultures. Of course we all need a few strings of lights, but wouldn’t it be great if we had PWM controlled dimmable lights?

When he started out on his PWM-controlled, AC-powered light box, [Waterbury] immediately realized that relays were not going to be an optimal solution. The best way out of the mess he dug himself into would be via zero crossing. After getting a transformer wired up to a transistor for the detection circuit, a short bit of code was written in the wee hours of the morning and a proof of concept was had.

With the control box complete, [Waterbury] hacked up a quick VB app and piped the output of a WinAmp visualizer into the lights via serial. The Inception demo was great, but finer-grain control was needed. After seeing a Hack a Day post on a nice equalizer chip, the seven band output on IC were converted to UART.

[Waterbury] took his seven-band AC-controlled light box to a Halloween party with his synth and the results looked awesome. You can check that out after the break, but we’re really waiting to see his Christmas decorations this year.

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Follow Up: Star Wars Tree Gets An Upgrade

December 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 2 Comments

We asked, and [Zach] listened.

Earlier this week, we featured a circuit he built which allowed his tiny Star Wars Christmas tree to visually replicate the series’ theme song. Several of you, along with myself, thought it would be far cooler if the tree also played the music to accompany the light show, so [Zach] set off to add that functionality.

Worried that the music would get annoying if it played along with the lights constantly, he tweaked his circuit design to incorporate a piezo buzzer that could be easily switched on and off. After wiring it to the MSP430 driving the light show, he tweaked the program to output signals to both the light string and buzzer simultaneously.

While the light show accurately represented the song, he initially ignored flat and sharp notes as they would be indistinguishable to the eye. In audio form however, the missing notes would be glaringly obvious, so he re-transcribed the sheet music resulting in the video you see below.

If you happened to follow [Zach’s] lead and put one of these together in your own house, be sure to swing by his site and grab the latest code, complete with audio track.

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Christmas Tree Water Sensor Gets An Upgrade And A Fancy New Box

December 7, 2011 by Mike Nathan 9 Comments

xmas-tree-water-sensor

[Eric Ayars] has a nice cast iron Christmas tree stand at home, but the only drawback is that the stand makes it hard to see just how much water is available to the tree. Last year we covered a small gadget he created to help keep tabs on the water level, but as several of you predicted, the system eventually failed.

His previous solution used copper plated proto board to sense how much water was in the stand, but the leads corroded in about a week’s time. With Christmas just around the corner, he decided to give things another try.

His revamped water level sensor relies on measuring capacitance changes in a copper strip board when under water rather than detecting a complete circuit like the previous model. To protect his sensor this time around he coated the board with polyurethane, which should provide a decent corrosion barrier.

Using the Arduino CapSense library, the sensor can detect the presence of water, signaling an alarm if the base needs refilling. One of our readers suggested that he use the tree itself as a low water indicator, which is just what [Eric] did this year. If the water is somewhat low, the Arduino-controlled relay powering the tree is switched off and then on again, every 5 seconds. If the base is nearly dry, the tree asks for water by blinking the word “Water” repeatedly in Morse code.

We think that this year’s solution is pretty clever, and we’re glad to see that [Eric] didn’t give up after last year’s setback!

The Force Is Strong With This Christmas Tree Light Show

December 5, 2011 by Mike Nathan 6 Comments

[Zach] is a huge Star Wars fan, and in addition to the array holiday decorations that adorn his house, he says that his wife is nice enough to let him put up a Christmas tree full of Star Wars ornaments. For the past few years, the tree sat in the corner of the room unlit, but his wife thought that it should have some lights this year.

His wife came home with a small string of battery-operated lights, but [Zach] wanted something with a bit more geek cred. He decided to program the lights to play the Star Wars theme song, translating the tune’s pitch to light intensity.

He dug through his bin of electronics and found an MSP430 along with a small target board that would do the job nicely. He sat down with some sheet music, translating the notes to PWM values, resulting in the light show you see below.

While his wife provided a lovely violin accompaniment to the tree, we think that a small audio module would make a great addition to the tree next year.

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G-35 Circuit Board Porn

November 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Todd Harrison] took a slew of pictures in his quest to loose all the secrets of the G-35 Christmas Lights. These are a string of 50 plastic bulbs which house individually addressable RGB LEDs. We’ve seen a ton of projects that use them, starting about a year ago with the original reverse engineering and most recently used to make a 7×7 LED matrix. But most of the time the original control board is immediately ditched for a replacement. It’s become so common that you can now buy a drop-in board, no hacking needed. We enjoy the hard look that [Todd] took at the electronics.

The stock controller uses a single layer, single sided board. There’s a resin-blob chip, but also an SOP-20 microcontroller. Since [Todd’s] using several strings of lights on his house, he wondered if it would be possible to improve on the controller in order to synchronize the strands. His investigation showed that the board was designed to host a crystal oscillator but it is unpopulated. Unfortunately you can’t just add those parts to improve the timing of the chip (firmware changes would also be requires). He found that there’s a spot for a push-button. Quickly shorting the pads cycles through the effects, shorting them for a longer time turns off the string of lights. There is wireless control, but it seems that the only functionality it provides is the same as the unpopulated switch.

We enjoyed the close-up circuit board photos, and we like the spacing jig he used to attach the lights to his fascia boards. We’ve embedded a lengthy video about his exploits after the break. Continue reading “G-35 Circuit Board Porn” →