Christmas lights that actually twinkle.

potatohead

We end up talking about this every year. Thought I would post it up here just to see what people have to say.

The old 110V dangerous Christmas lights were wired in a simple parallel circuit. All of them were colored, with simple colors. Red, blue, violet, green, etc... Each had the simple mechanical flasher device, where current flowing caused the metal to expand, thus breaking the circuit. (maybe just heat from the filament, never knew) The imperfections in manufacturing more or less meant each light kind of did it's own thing.

At night, it was fun to just watch the tree as all the different cycles working together made for interesting and fun patterns, and the lights on the ceiling were just great too. More cool patterns.

In this day of lower voltage (and clearly safer) lights, this was lost. We've got patterns of different kinds, fade in, fade out, etc.. We've got more colors now too, which is good.

But... nothing just twinkles, and we miss that enough that I'm half tempted to just go find a set, and manage the things so they are safe, and watch them again.

Is this just an oversight for cost, or what? Maybe nobody cares?

Is it possible to make a circuit where lower voltage lights, maybe the flasher ones, can just twinkle like the old ones did?

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WBA Consulting

Just put the old school flasher bulb in place of one of the LEDs??? I don't know if an LED strand will pass enough current to allow the flasher bulbs to generate the heat required to cause the "switch" element to separate, but you might give that a try.

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Andrew Williams
WBA Consulting
IT / Web / PCB / Audio

PJAllen

Each light on a string blinked at its own rate?

Flasher_LEDs are available in all LED colors, even multi-color.· Wire 'em up.

These aren't in a string, but you can get the idea (?).

potatohead

Heck, those are not bad. A little fast, but not bad. The only thing missing then would be the warm up period, where it's all on, and one by one they start to blink.

Thanks for the link!

Yeah they did all blink at their own rate. Variations in manufacture on the spring that caused the blink, allowed rates from about a coupla seconds, to maybe 15 or so, ramping up as the bulbs got hotter.


RE: Flasher bulbs

All of the strings I have found are in series. LED ones are parallel? Have to check on the current needed. Thanks for that too.

This will probably be a project to get done before the next holiday.

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kwinn

I was thinking about twinkling lights as well this year while sitting near a tree that had entire chains of lights blinking on and off to music (really annoying that is). What I am thinking of doing is putting LED's in a series chain and running them from 110V through a constant current source. A transistor shorts across an individual LED to turn it off momentarily. Obviously not every LED can be a blinker or you risk having the entire chain of transistors shorting and overloading the constant current source.

kelvin james

Interesting that you bring up the subject, i have 2 sets of old light strings that i still use with the 110v twinkle bulbs for my tree. I use the old back reflectors and it looks better than any led product out there. They are bright with a full warm colour ( tinsel reflects the colours great ), and as you said, blink at random. I just purchased some replacement bulbs before xmas, so they are still being made. There is some type of filament heating action that makes them blink. I also use some bubble lights, the ones that look like a small candle, and the heat of the bulb below makes the fluid bubble in the clear tube.

I wouldn't chance this on a real tree, and i use a power bar with circuit protection. You could use some high output leds with some coloured diffusers doing a random thing from software. Whether that setup is any safer is questionable. Just think, in the old days they used real candles on real trees.

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