Tabletop Tree Lights


Posted on Feb 6, 2014

A cheap garland tree and fill it full of blinking LEDs. The tree shown is a cheap garland wrapped plastic frame from Walmart. It could easily be made, but I didn`t feel like taking the time to do so. Besides, I got in on clearance, so I might not have been able to make it as cheaply as I bought it. Plus, what would I do with the left over materials They`d probably make a nice a dust collector.


Tabletop Tree Lights
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.

On its own, this tree is a wonderful splash of bright color in our drab camper, but it could definitely be improved. I mean, what kind of Christmas tree doesn`t have lights on it Even before electricity was invented, people lit candles on their trees to illuminate them. This seemed like a perfect project to get rid of some older LEDs I had to make room for new stock. It would also be a good use of my ever increasing pile of scrap wire pieces. All it would need is a battery, switch, and some LEDs, but of course that isn`t all I did with it. I wanted the LEDs to blink, and I wanted to control the speed. The resulting circuit is far from perfect, but it was a great first attempt at bringing a bit of Christmas cheer to a pair of nomads. I really wanted as random of a blinking pattern as possible using only a few components I had lying around. The obvious choice for controlling the speed would be a 555 timer IC in combination with a potentiometer, the challenge was creating a simple randomizing circuit. To start, I went with a 74393 counter IC to split the 555 output into varying speeds. I knew an easy way to create a lot of outputs would be to use some type of decoder, but using standard binary counting would create somewhat logical patterns. To create the seemingly random blinking, I ran the counter outputs into the inputs of a 7447 BCD to 7 segment decoder. This chip combined the abnormal BCD count with the strange outputs...




Leave Comment

characters left:

Related Circuits

  • New Circuits

    .

     


    Popular Circuits

    Water-level-sensor-and-control
    Scope-extender
    Measure your stress level Tension meter Schematic Diagram
    Circuit Description
    Parallel fed Colpits oscillator circuit
    temperature control circuit 555 ic
    Stereo balance indicator
    TDA8571J car audio amplifier electronic project circuit design
    monitor an input pulse train



    Top