RGB LED Christmas Star

Hi LMRtians,

this is my actual christmas project. A star build out of Plexi and an Adafruit RGB LED strip. Controlled by an Arduino controller. It will be used as christmas decoration behind a window of our house. Looks pretty cool at night.

The RGB LED strip is a great device for this. You can control the color and intensity of each single LED. Only 2 Arduino pins are needed to control 60 or more RGB LEDs. The LED strip is like one big serial shift register. A ready-to-use library can be downloaded at GitHub.

Partlist:

• Arduino 328
• 60x RGB LEDs (2m) Adafruit RGB LED strip
• sheet of Plexiglass 50x25cm 3mm thick
• Wires, 4pin connectors male/female

Creation:

The RGB star was created with Google SketchUp. The first sketch shows the prelimary result:

For better usage of the plastic sheet, the star is cutted into pieces (5 triangles, 1 pentagram)

The front view of the finished RGB star:

The backside view is showing the RGB LED strip. It is cut into pieces of 5 segments with 12 RGB LEDs. For a more homogenious design the segments are splitted into pieces with 4 and 8 RGB LEDs. The RGB LED strip can be cut down into pieces as small as 2 RGB LEDs

Later expansions:

At the moment only a slightly modfied Adafruit example is running. Later on I will add an IR Receiver to switch between different modes of operation or change duration time and color with an IR remote.

 

Videos:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lih-7t2ZGVI