Oh Christmas Tree, Oh RGB Tree ---
kelvin james
Posts: 531
Not really a completed project, as this is just a temporary thing for xmas. I picked up a 9.99 fibre optic xmas tree from the local liquidator store to see what i could do with it. In the base it has a halogen lamp ( which gets pretty hot ), and a multi-colour wheel turned by a motor. I pulled all that out, pretty simple, just assembled with screws. On a small breadboard i wired 8 leds with resistors, a pair of red, green and blue, and added a yellow and orange. They all form a small semi-circlular formation. I used a 74hc595 shifter to an uln2803 on the demo board to drive the leds. For the program itself, i use a bs2p, a random bit pattern generator, and a random time for the pause for the on time. Since this is just a temporary thing, the base was big enough to just set the demo board on the bottom, with the led board on top of that. Lots of tweaking, like resistor values and distance / angle of the optic base to the leds. Anyway, it looks really good, especially in a dark room. The combination of leds gives out various colours at different times. No rocket science here, just something a little different for christmas lighting. And i get a little halogen lamp, a 12vAC synchronous gear motor, and a 1 amp power supply as a bonus. I added a couple of pics here, but really does not do it justice. I tried to put a small video on youtube, but by the time it was compressed it wasn't worth the effort for the end result.
1098 x 1024 - 253K
1024 x 1536 - 329K
672 x 1024 - 236K
668 x 1024 - 240K
1312 x 2048 - 217K
Comments
I wasn't thinking of doing quite what you did, though I may, but had though i might steal the fibre optics for other projects!
Cheers
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
<FONT>Steve
What's the best thing to do in a lightning storm? "take a one iron out the bag and hold it straight up above your head, even God cant hit a one iron!"
Lee Travino after the second time being hit by lightning!
Kinda takes me back to the old days of lava lamps and black lights. Yeah i figure the optic strands will be good to play around with, don't know for what purpose yet, but for 10 bucks if nothing developes it's no big deal. I finally have a short video on youtube that is not too bad, but still only a fraction of the real look. Anyway, gotta go shovel some snow, actually a lot of it.
youtube.com/watch?v=6-egTRHRqiY