Quick LED Pumpkin Lighting

We had some left over LED strips from the TeleToyland Sandbox 2 project (Instructable), so we decided to turn them into quick Jack-o-lantern lighting.

They only take a few minutes to make, so you can build a bunch of them quickly, and they come in many colors. These LED strips are designed to be run off of 12 volts, but you can use a 9 volt battery, and it all fits easily in a pumpkin. The strips are parallel, so you can use any length you want, and no resistors etc. are required.

Step 1 Materials

There are very few parts:

1) LED Strips - you can get these in many places like the below:

• Adafruit - there is also a nice tutorial on soldering leads here
• HobbyPartz - lots of color choices here

We had some left over strips of 9 LEDs each - about 5.75" long, but you can use any length you want. You can cut the longer strips down at the marked cut points every three lights - about every two inches.

These strips are waterproof and they have adhesive tape on the back.

2) 9v battery clip

3) heat shrink tubing (~1/4") - about 1/2" long

Comments

[scoochmaroo]

Cool. Much safer than candles!

[CarlS]

Thanks - haven't carved the pumpkins yet, but I think this will beat the other lights I have been using. Safer than the flame throwing pumpkin too! :-)

[cmreiser]

great project!