Top-of-the-Bill Lights Sequencer

Programmable fairy lights

PROJECT | JANUARY 25, 2012

Rope-lights and fairy-lights are starting to appear in supermarkets everywhere. They’re ridiculously cheap, it’s true, but don’t you think they’re a bit short on originality? The project described in this article attempts to put this right, admittedly at greater cost, but what fun to build your very own lights, entrancing and totally unique and what a fine present they’d make, too!

 

These lights let you produce the most dramatic lighting effects, by altering the countless available movement patterns (variable-speed chaser, random illumination, short or long flashes, etc.), and adjusting the colour (32 levels), saturation (16 levels, including white), and brightness (24 levels) — that means over 10,000 possible colour permutations!

Broadly speaking, the system consists of a master module that drives from 1 to 62 slave modules, identical in all respects (the ‘lights’), with a 9 V PSU, supplying at least 2 A for 30 lights. The power supply is distributed to the master and lights in parallel.