This project is very much geared towards Christmas Decorations but with a little imagination the technique could be applied to all sorts of other applications.
It's REALLY important normally to not connect anything DIRECTLY to the computer. These LED based lights are designed to work on THREE dry cells (AA Batteries) instead of the more usual TWO. This means that they run on 4.5v which is very close to the 5v that the computer uses. They already have a “Current Limiting Resistor” which is very close to the correct value, so I think I can get away with it, I have not calculated anything! It's a really quick and dirty prototype that works, I haven't had any problems...
,,,YET!
It's REALLY important normally to not connect anything DIRECTLY to the computer. These LED based lights are designed to work on THREE dry cells (AA Batteries) instead of the more usual TWO. This means that they run on 4.5v which is very close to the 5v that the computer uses. They already have a “Current Limiting Resistor” which is very close to the correct value, so I think I can get away with it, I have not calculated anything! It's a really quick and dirty prototype that works, I haven't had any problems...
,,,YET!
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Seriously, Parallel ports are not THAT rare, and I think they're rather undervalued. A lot of things you can do with "Arduino" and other microcontrollers, can be done directly with the computer using the parallel port.
I'll have to get that second instructable done about the connections and stuff.
Hope you voted for me in the competition thingys.
Sunshiine