How-To: Hack Addressable Christmas Lights into a 7x7 Display

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By Matt Richardson
Posted 2011/11/07 @ 4:15 am
Category Arduino, Electronics, Hacks, Home

John Graham-Cumming created this sleek 7×7 LED display by hacking up a string of addressable Christmas lights from GE. Starting from Robert Quattlebaum’s excellent tutorial, he mounted an Arduino Pro and GE Color Effects G-35 Christmas lights inside a frame and diffused the light with a cutting board. I especially like how he used servo arms to secure the backing to the frame. He coded the Arduino so that custom messages and patterns can be displayed and in the video above he shows it displaying “Thanks GE” for making these hackable Christmas lights. [via Reddit]

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BY Matt Richardson

Matt Richardson is a Brooklyn-based creative technologist, contributing editor for MAKE magazine, and co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi. He's also the owner of Awesome Button Studios, a technology consultancy. Highlights from his work include the Descriptive Camera (a camera which outputs a text description instead of a photo) and The Enough Already (a DIY celebrity-silencing device). Matt's work has been featured at The Nevada Museum of Art, The Rome International Photography Festival, Milan Design Week and has garnered attention from The New York Times, Wired, and New York Magazine.

mattrichardson.com

In the Maker Shed

0 Responses to How-To: Hack Addressable Christmas Lights into a 7×7 Display

John Graham-Cumming on November 7th, 2011 at 4:45 am said:

Glad you like the project and the servo arms I was hunting around in my junk box for stuff to make this and the nylon nuts as spacers and servo arms were the best I could come up with. If you look carefully you’ll notice that the servo arms are fixed on with Torx screws because I had some of those lying around as well.

Moral: never throw anything away!

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Halfvast Conspirator on November 7th, 2011 at 1:30 pm said:

I like the hack, wondered if something like this might be also/easier to use to something similar, or to extend the technique: http://www.adafruit.com/products/306
Digital Addressable RGB LED w/ PWM waterproof flexi strip 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually

Looks like a fair amount of soldering would still be involved but it might be easier in some ways?

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