Hacking Christmas Lights with Arduino!

Looking for a great DIY project this weekend? Try using your Arduino to hack christmas lights! via deep darc

This string contains fifty “bulbs”. Each bulb contains a red, green, and blue LED—allowing for any color to be produced. The biggest drawback is how you control them: there are 14 pre-set “programs” that you can select, and they are all pretty lame. However, with a little reverse engineering and an Arduino (or any other microcontroller) they can be made into the coolest Christmas lights on the block. If you buy several strings, you could easily make a large 2D LED array. The possibilities are endless…

So far I’ve reverse engineered both the radio protocol and the protocol used on the LED data bus. Of the two, the LED data bus protocol is by far the most interesting. So that’s where I’ll start…

Read the full tutorial here


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1 Comment

  1. I have a tree with 15 strands of 25 lights running off of an arduino mega with ethernet adapter that accepts light commands from a java program running on a raspberry pi. It’s been a pretty fun project but I cannot find these lights for sale anymore in Canada..

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