Vumeter Light Deco

I will show you how i made this nice and easy to make light-decoration for your next party or just for your living room. The lamp lights up in a vumeter-style when music is playing - in fact it IS a vumeter... For that reason it needs an audio input you have to connect it to the line-out of your music device.

See the video to get an idea of it:

Step 1 Parts, Tools and Skills

Parts:
10 LEDs
1 Current limiting resistor (R1) - value depends on your LEDs
1 2,2µF Capacitor
1 LM 3915
1 mono audio jack with cable
some pieces of wire
1 piece of protoboard like the Mini Board from Radioshack
1 soldering strip (i used it because i had one, you could also use a piece of cardboard)
1 little switch
1 piece of sandwich paper or similar kind of paper
1 high glass or glass cylinder
1 9 V Block battery and battery clip

optional:
for testing the circuit before soldering a simple breadboard could be fine.
1 piece of black paper for holiday decoration

Tools:
Soldering iron and solder
Wire stripper
Hot glue gun
Diagonal Cutters

optional:
Multimeter
"Handy Hands" or "Third Hand" (if you like you could build your own)
Desoldering tool

Skills:

- you should have basic soldering skills (Instructable How to solder)
- using your multimeter (Lady Adas Multimeter How to)
- some basic informations about LEDs (LEDs for beginners Instructable)

Comments

[b3tn01hasd1s]

 I will be using 5 green leds(link) 2 yellow leds(link) 2 orange leds(link) and 1 red led(link). I believe the yellow, orange, and red have the same specs. but the green one is different. What kind of resistor should I put. and by you saying 100 ohm resistor do you mean per led then times that by 10?

[mischka]

No the current limiting resistor is R1 on the photo. Its attached between pin 7 and pin 8. This one "programs" the chip to limit the current of all LEDs with the same value. Id recomment you to study the datasheet of the chip over there. Sorry, i cant give you detailled informations, because i just tried it like Joe did.