Christmas Light Controller

December 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

We get a lot of tips about Christmas light controllers but rarely do they contain the kind of juicy detail that [Vince Cappellano] included with his setup. His video explaining the controller he built is embedded after the break and it’s not to be missed.

We think there’s a lot of good design invovled in this porject. First off, he’s got eight physical channels, each with optisolation and a triac for 256 levels of power control. But he was able to double the control to sixteen virtual channels if you’re using LED lighting. That’s because on those strings half of the LEDs are reverse biased compared to the rest. By adding sensing circuitry to the incoming AC, he can switch the triacs to only send positive or negative voltage through the LED strands, which produces the additional virtual channels. And did we mention that he did all this using wire wrapping and point-to-point soldering?

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Chat List Indicator Uses Hacked Xmas Lights

December 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

Here’s a way to display which friends are logged into chat. This uses the same G-35 hacked Christmas lights we saw earlier in the month. [Andrejk’s] company uses Microsoft Lync as their chat protocol when working in teams. The service has an SDK that allowed him to write some .NET code to check status and display it on the string of lights. It works much as you would expect; red for busy, green for available, purple is out-of-office, and we’d guess that yellow is for away. Watch him demonstrate the system after the break.

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Hacked LED Christmas Lights

December 1, 2010 by Devlin Thyne 35 Comments

[Robert] wanted more out of his GE Color Effects G-35 LED Christmas lights. He reverse engineered and then hacked the protocol the lights use to communicate so that he can control each bulb. A 26-bit frame contains a 6-bit address, an 8-bit brightness value, and a 12-bit color value. The daisy chain topology of the data bus allows for modular bulbs with addresses enumerated during the startup of the string of lights. With this information, a 5 volt capable microcontroller is able to control a whole string of these lights with a refresh rate of up to 24Hz. In this case, [Robert] used an ATtiny13A microcontroller to control the string of lights. You can see a video of them in action after the break.

Also taken apart and analyzed, were the wireless transmitter and receiver that came with the lights, revealing a cheap ISM band receiver and transmitter module pair. Perhaps they will be useful for another project. We look forward to seeing people put these hacked lights to use throughout the year.

[via Make]

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How To Build A Life-sized Electronic Game

September 12, 2009 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

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We’re very impressed with [Steve’s] Electronic Snowball Fight game. It consists of two life-sized players standing opposite of each other. Each can throw a snowball or duck, the object is to hit the other person and not get hit yourself. He’s utilized a lot of good building techniques that could be easily adapted to other types of game play. Continue reading “How To Build A Life-sized Electronic Game” →

Sound Activated Christmas Lights

December 2, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

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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.

Neon Light Christmas Tree

November 10, 2008 by Kimberly Lau 4 Comments

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Everyone always complains about the Christmas season coming earlier and earlier, but we think when we can have Christmas trees like the one pictured above, it’s not such a bad thing. Created by English fashion designer [Gareth Pugh], the tree features sixty white neon tubes, and is supported by a freestanding metal rod. It reminds us of the light sabers in Star Wars, which is probably why we like it so much. The tree is just a carrier for the decorations anyway, right? You can check out the tree in person at the TOPSHOP in Oxford Circus, London.