Help with electricity & christmas lights

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richarddas
 
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Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2014 3:16 pm

Help with electricity & christmas lights

Post by richarddas »

Newbie question, please excuse me if this is too basic, but I'm just looking for a place to start:

So I have a strand of store-bought Christmas LED lights, which are attached to a controller box, which in turn plugs into the wall.

The annoying thing is that the controller box has 1 button on it, which toggles the lights through a series of blinking patterns. Pattern 7 is "always-on", the only one I'm interested in (don't like blinking lights).

What I'd like to do is just cut the cable from the lights to the controller box, plug the strand into my own built controller, and plug the controller into the wall. My question is, where do I start with this? What kind of controller do I need, and how would the controller power the lights? I've got a fairly good grasp on basic electronics, but I'm just looking for a place to start with this.

Ultimately what I'd like to do is enable the controller to work on a timer, or based off motion detector or similar. But for starters, can someone point me in the right direction to just get a basic controller in place that can power the lights and turn them on/off? All the tutorials I seem to find relate to highly elaborate "Christmas Vacation"-style projects :)

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tseary
 
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Re: Help with electricity & christmas lights

Post by tseary »

What voltage does the strand run on? I'm betting 120 VAC or 12 VDC.

In any case, you can use a relay to turn the strand on and off. Your controller can use a single digital pin to operate the relay as shown.
Image
(VCC is the relay coil voltage, typically 5 VDC to 12 VDC).

As for the type of controller, a Trinket would probably be sufficient. You could attach a real-time clock, motion sensor etc. to get the desired behaviour.

As an alternate solution, you might consider getting a regular string of Christmas lights (without control box) and a plug-in timer (like this one) to turn the lights on and off at certain times of day.

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