USB Powered Mystic Light

Step 6 Test the LED cable: apply power and Voila!

Now it's time to try out the LED cable to make sure it works.  There's not a lot that can go wrong along the way, but if you want, you can certainly try applying power in an earlier step once everything has been soldered.  Just be careful to avoid letting the bare wires touch and causing shorts.

My recommendation is not to just plug this in your computer and see what happens. The best way to test this is to use a USB wall charger like the one that comes with an iPod or with other consumer electronics. That way, if something unlikely and bad happens, the damage is limited to a low cost gizmo and not your expensive laptop.  If it works with a USB wall charger, then you should have no problems using it with your computer.

So, all caveats given, time to try it out.  Plug the USB cable into the USB charger and you should see beautiful changing colors from the LED as shown in the image for this step.

Comments

[thatinventor1]

could we make a socket to be abel to change out led colors?

[talk2bruce]

You don't really need one to change the colors since the LEDs in this project change colors automatically. But, using a socket would be a good idea if you used regular non-color changing LEDs.