Sound Reactive Holiday Christmas LED Lights

Hey guys, Michael with Elemental LED here! For the holidays, I wanted to take some of our Celebright lights have them create a dancing effect. The strips have such a cool look and I really wanted to expand on it some more.

These look really awesome on a tree and the effect the three different strands give off together is really cool. The design of the lights is really nice as well as you can do a lot of different types of projects with them.

The inspiration was to have my Christmas tree lights dance to the music I would play at a holiday party. Check out the video to get a better idea:

Notice the lights are reacting to the bass line because I set the Jammer to channel 6, react to bass! ;)

Step 1: Grab Your Materials

Here is what you will need for this project.

A tree is a good start. :)

Celebright LED Holiday Lights in Blue, White and Muliticolor
3 Female DC Wire Plugs
3 LED Adapter Slice Cables
Apollo Jammer
12W 12V Adapter

Each Celebright strand has a DC plug on it. A DC connection is just a plug in version of a positive (+) and negative (-) connection. The LED Adapter Slice Cable is going to convert from that plug-in setting to a "Hard Wire" setting.

Once plugged in to all three Celebright strands you will have 6 splice connections available to use.

Step 2: Wire in to the Apollo Jammer Color Controller

The Apollo Jammer color controller functions like most other color controllers out there in the fact that it is a 4-channel system firing four signals. This color controller fires channel 1 (power), 2, 3 and 4.

Channels 2, 3 and 4 are typically used on systems with Red, Green and Blue. A good example is if you set a color controller to access the color purple and the controller was set to blue on channel 1 as well as channel 2, it would fire channel 1 and 2.

With an LED strip light each chip has 3 colors ending in the outcome of blending. What we are doing here is having the Apollo Jammer send out signals to channels and it is not specific to a color. We will have 3 individual strands reacting separately but wound together with the illusion of one line.

Step 3: Wind Your Sections Together

Take two of your three sections of Celebright strip light and wrap them together, I found it was best to have someone help as the strands were long.

Once you have two strands together repeat the process to add the third strand to it.

Step 4: Stranded!

...

Step 5: Put Them on the Tree!

Step 6: Other Uses

You can do a lot with stuff. Here is a great example.

I wound it around a Christmas tree topper.

What can you use it for? :)

Comments

[Kadiya]

love instructable! Now does the Apollo Jammer need to be connected to a speaker or music source? I wanted to do a similar project that reacts to any noise whether music, talking, etc... Do you think I could use this same technique to achieve that?