![]() When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Happy holidays! Posted in Holiday Hacks Tagged christmas, christmas lights, magnets Meanwhile, no matter how much you enjoy seasonal decoration brinkmanship, don’t even think about watching Deck the Halls (2006). Danny Devito has saved a lot of films, but he couldn’t save this. We’ve featured great primers on getting started with advanced Christmas light displays before, if you’re looking to up your game. For more complicated installations, you might still have to climb up a ladder. Washers, spacers, and screws are used to attach the magnets and hooks to the lights.įor a layout that follows the lines of a simple peaked roof, this hack works great. The magnets are used to hold the lights to metal roof siding, while the hooks allow the lights to be lifted into place using a hook on a large extendable pole. The build uses hefty magnets and triangle eye bolts, attached at regular intervals to the string of Christmas lights. One enterprising hacker has whipped up a neat way to avoid ladders entirely, by hanging their lights while planted safely on the ground. Getting up on a ladder to hang Christmas lights is a great way to hurt yourself if you’re not careful, and winter conditions only add to the peril. Video after the break.Ĭontinue reading “LED Christmas Lights Optimized For Max Twinkleage” → Posted in LED Hacks Tagged christmas lights, holiday hacks, led, leds, ws2811 Meanwhile, if you’re wondering how the older-style lights used to twinkle, we’ve covered that before too. Using a faster microcontroller should net reliable performance with longer strings. Using an Arduino Uno or Leonardo, reports its possible to twinkle 300 individual LEDs at a rate of over 50 updates a second. To create the twinkling effect, each LED has its own unique clock signal, so they vary in brightness at different times and at different rates. The Arduino is programmed to vary the brightness of each LED according to a triangle wave function. demo setup is built around using WS2811 LEDs, put together in a string with plastic diffusers on each bulb. The program is known as TwinkleFOX, and relies on the popular FastLED library for addressable LEDs. To rectify this, some time ago, built an Arduino program that makes LEDs twinkle beautifully. LEDs, with their hard-on and hard-off nature, aren’t naturally predisposed to such behavior. It's a shame it's so limited.Old-school filament-based Christmas lights used to be available in twinkling form. This has so far been an interesting device to play around with. Silicon Labs C2 perhaps?Īnd here are some photos of it in operation I suspect the 5 pin connector is some sort of debug port. Some more closeups of the DAC and an amp. The four-pin cable right next to the 8051 connects to the touchscreen. What I can do, is place an arduino or similar micro on the top two resistors coming out of the 8051 (Pins 17 and 18 on the datasheet respectively) and drive the motors myself, while leaving all the other stuff intact. Sadly, the EEPROM is too big for my flash jumper, so we won't be able to get a good look at the software and do a software-only hack. It's strange that they spent money putting it in the BOM if it was only used for testing or something. ![]() I don't know what the button's for, It's not connected to anything. There is a separate 8 pin 16 bit DAC connected to the GPIO of the 8051 for driving the speaker. It's a Silicon Labs C8051F410/2, a Intel 8051 micro compatible with a pair of 12 bit DACs, presumably to drive the motors. From previous explorations I've found that the micro is that little one in the top right next to that ROM chip. I suspect that this drives the two motors. Most of the board to the left is just two reflections of what appears to be the same circuit. Yay! I'm a little bit intimidated by all those little potentiometers. Note the "NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE" sticker. I marked the triangle bits in red, and the Phillip's head in blue. I decided to not mess with it as I might bring it out of alignment and cause all sorts of nasty stuff I don't know how to fix to happen. There is a ninth Phillip's head screw towards the aperture of the projector that secures the laser in place on the inside of the projector. To start off there are eight triangle-bit screws around the edge of the device.
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