Ornament Gift with Color LEDs Design help?!

[KevinAlaska]

Hello Everyone and thank you for your time in reading this.

I have a year of electronics in college but that was more then 18 years ago and I have forgotten probably half of it. So please bare with me.

A few years ago I purchased this little Christmas Ornaments that you plug into the little light bulb sockets on the christmas lights on the tree. I really do like them and had the idea of making some for girfts next year.

These lights only have a single blue LED in a clear plastic ice cute guy. I was hoping to make something a little more fun with more LED colors that sort of phase into the other colors kind of slowly with an small overlapping in color period. Maybe 3 colors... heck... maybe 4.... lol or just maybe Red and Green colors. I guess I am not too picky.

I would guess Christmas lights run on a 110VAC here in the USA. So I am not sure how this could be achieved safely with LEDs and some Diodes and maybe with some capacitors. Maybe I am way of base. Maybe I am needing some kind of chip for this task.

what ever I do I would like it to 1) be small to fix correctly if possible. 2) cheep would be second best. 4 kids make the pocket book small with my budget. These are not all required but would be nice.

So with this all said, would anyone have any advice on how I could get started trying to figure out this thing. I know if I dont get this going now I will NEVER get them done before next Christmas.

Well thank you EVERYONE for your time again.

Best Wishes all,

Kevin in Alaska

 

[audioguru]

Hi Kevin,
I have some solar garden lights that have a single LED that fades red, green and blue one after the other. The electronics for the fading is inside the LED. The LEDs must be available somewhere.

The best and safest power source for your project is an AC to DC adapter.

 

[KevinAlaska]

AC to DC adapter. That is a great GREAT idea. I can create an easy setup for using that. Just need to figure out what kind etc etc etc.

Thank you for the good idea. Have any ideas on what that LED type is? Never heard of such a thing. But my knowledge on this subject is very limited.

Thanks again for the input

Best Wishes

Kevin in Alaska

 

[audioguru]

My solar garden lights with the 3-colours fading LED is made in China. I doubt that the datasheet for the LED is available in English so we can see how to power it. Maybe another LED manufacturer who makes them and has an English datasheet.

 

[Gayan Soyza]

If you can find automatic colour changing LED's it will be ok.But if you realy want to build a circuit here is one.Also can do with a microcontroller to fade more LED's.

**broken link removed**

Here is the original link
**broken link removed**

 

[House0Fwax]

Look on eBay for "Rainbow LED". They flash between colours.

 

[KevinAlaska]

SWEET!... thank you so much for this link. I am going to go out this week and and purchase the supplies to try it out. Thank you ever so much.

Anyone know of a good place to purchase the LM324's cheep. Maybe no more then 100 of them... let me see. 7 different family set in my family plus 1 for me = 8 families, and maybe 5 or 6 lights on each set for a christmas tree. so yeah maybe 50 of them would be good. heh.

Well anyhow thank you for the great advice none the less. I will have to go on ebay to check out the LM324's and the Rainbow LEDs.

Cheers and best wishes.

Kevin in Alaska

 

[House0Fwax]

thank you for the great advice

No problem, I'm sure that Gayan Soyza feels the same way.

 

[Sceadwian]

Rainbow LED's won't sync though so every bulb on the tree is going to be changing to a different colour at different times, depending on the colours they switch to it could look really tacky on a Christmas tree.

 

[things]

try jaycar they have those colour changing led's for a reasonable price.
also audioguru, how do those led's work in the solar light i have tried to replace the original led's to colour changing but it only comes up red and doesn't fade in and out. i have a feeling that the one nicad doesn't have enough power to run it, any ideas

thanks

 

[audioguru]

New solar garden lights have only a single 1.2V Ni-Cad battery cell. They use a SMPS circuit to step-up the voltage.
A red LED needs about 1.8V, a blue or white LED needs about 3.5V.

 

[things]

sorry, i'm not very good at this sort of thing but do you have any circuit designs that will work with the led and solar light

thanks