Reverse engineering the “most awesome Christmas lights”
Happy Holidays! Recently in Schenectady, GE Energy changed the lighting in the large monogram atop their main building to its annual red and green holiday lighting.
I wanted to take a minute to share with you one of my favorite lighting stories so far this season. While browsing through electronics blogs recently I came across a very interesting piece of work on the advanced capabilities that can be unlocked in one of my favorite seasonal light sources… Christmas lights! On his blog, “Deep Darc,” Robert Sun Quattlebaum posted about the Christmas lights that he calls “the most awesome Christmas lights ever”, the GE Color Effects G-35. Robert, with some “reverse engineering” and microcontroller work has made what he calls “the coolest Christmas lights on the block”. He was able to gain color and brightness control over each individual light and developed a display where “the possibilities are endless.”
Check out his blog for yourself and take a look at the video he has put together. We love stories here that combine ingenuity, creativity, and brains to make something really neat, and of course these lights are quite spectacular! If you have any other Christmas lighting stories, please share them with us in the coming weeks. As you may recall in October we used the hashtag #weheartlighting and asked you to share your favorite skyline or lighting photos for Lighting Appreciation Day.
If you are anything like me, you are finding it hard to believe that Halloween and Thanksgiving are behind us and it is December already—we are in full swing of the holiday season! If you are even more like me, you are enjoying the beautiful lighting displays that pop up this time of year. Please continue to share photos and any lighting stories you have, especially of any festive displays that catch your eye!
I think the big question coming from the DIY Christmas community (including Darc) is – When will we be able to buy strands with just a connector? (No controller/wireless – no need to pay for that when we’re using our own controller.)
Also, will you be fixing the “glitches when incrementing/decrementing brightness greater than 1 unit” bug (See Darc’s blog under “Bugs in the Bulbs”)? It doesn’t affect your strands out-of-the-box since they never attempt such brightness changes, but it would make these much more attractive to the DIY crowd.
If that small issue is fixed and the “controller tax” is eliminated, I’ll be buying piles of these next year.