Need help with a fairy light project (for proposal)

Thread Starter

Lobi

Joined Mar 11, 2018
1
Hi guys,
I'm a little need to this so I'm asking for help although im asking around with my friends with some electrical knowledge. but there's something i want to check.
the fairy light i have gotten is:
Specifications:
Light color: warm white
Power: 6pcs AA batteries
Quantity of LED:100 leds
Length of string: 10 meter
Attached is the circuit of the controller.

So is it possible for me to solder the controller to 4-6 other fairy light to still have the chaser effect?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks
 

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Tonyr1084

Joined Sep 24, 2015
7,852
Without knowing how the one unit is wired it's not going to be easy to give you a good answer as to whether you can increase the length of the string. One thing is for sure, if you want to chase down the length of one string and then continue the chase down the second and third (however many you propose) it's going to take more power. What I mean to say is that if you want the first string to chase from (lets say) left to right and have the second and third strings do the same at the same time then you're going to need more power. If, however, you want one string to chase into the next and the next with only a single LED being lit at any given instance then it's not going to take more power but it's probably going to require some innovative thinking on just how to accomplish that with an already built circuit.

To start - we need to know how the one you have is wired. We also need to know how many strings you want to chase AND we need to know whether you want it to chase from string to string OR if you want it to chase all three strings (or more) at the same time.
 

Audioguru

Joined Dec 20, 2007
11,248
The controller is designed to drive the 100 LEDs connected to it, not any more strings of LEDs.
Each LED is probably one of the moderns addressable LEDs and the controller sends data to tell which LED to turn on. The controller says "turn on LED #98" then LED #98 hears it and turns on. You cannot make the controller say "turn on LED #156" or any number higher than 100 and the LEDs are not numbered higher than 100 anyway.

Maybe you can design a circuit to detect when the first controller begins the chase again then your new circuit turns on the second controller and its 100 LEDs and turns off the first controller, then the third controller, then the fourth etc.
 

Tonyr1084

Joined Sep 24, 2015
7,852
Maybe you can design a circuit to detect when the first controller begins the chase again then your new circuit turns on the second controller and its 100 LEDs and turns off the first controller, then the third controller, then the fourth etc.
Was thinking that myself. But I'm not seeing an easy way to accomplish the task. I DO know how to chase 100 LED's from a single controlled source. It involves two decade counters. Three decade counters would be able to chase a single LED as far as 1000 long. That'd take a 555, three CD4017's and at least 20 transistors, and a bit of logical wiring. But that's not an arduino approach. I resist modern programming for good old fashioned designing a dedicated circuit. However, with an arduino you could program it to run a light from one end to the other then back again much more easily than designing a dedicated circuit for that purpose. AND you could have it chase two LED's in opposite directions, make them bounce into one another or do all other sorts of weird and neat things.
 

ebeowulf17

Joined Aug 12, 2014
3,307
It would help to know what the current effect is. It might be as simple as an all-white strip wired similarly to the RGB strips - in other words, small groupings of lights wired in a small number of parallel circuits. I've seen chaser lights kind of like Vegas signs from the 70s, where maybe every fourth light was wired together, so at any given time 25% of the lights are lit, then you skip one light down at each position, so the next 25% are lit, etc.

If it was something like this, you might have four discrete outputs that fire in a simple loop, in which case adding more lights might just require 4 transistors or MOSFETs to handle the extra current of more lights (and of course more/larger batteries.)

The solution depends entirely on the nature of the current lights and controller. Not nearly enough info yet from the thread starter to know anything for sure.
 

Audioguru

Joined Dec 20, 2007
11,248
A link to the 100 LEDs chasing was not provided so I assume they are connected together using only 3 wires: positive voltage, 0V and data like in ordinary modern LED strips.
 
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