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CircuiTree of Lights
Three years ago I posted about a little Tree of Lights that consisted of conductive paint and auto-changing RGB LEDs. Over the years I had to mend some of the connections with wire glue. But, again, this year, I found that most of the connections, all but one actually, had broken. The LED legs had physically broken the traces by pulling away from the tree-form.
So I gave in and soldered silicon wire between all the connections. As wire has much lower resistance I needed to add resistors as well. I also added proper wire connectors for ease of adding power, and added so much hot glue to try and hide the wires in the pre-existing paint traces. The main benefit of the wires is that now the whole thing runs happily off 3Vs, whereas before I was struggling to get half-decent brightness with 9Vs.
So I gave in and soldered silicon wire between all the connections. As wire has much lower resistance I needed to add resistors as well. I also added proper wire connectors for ease of adding power, and added so much hot glue to try and hide the wires in the pre-existing paint traces. The main benefit of the wires is that now the whole thing runs happily off 3Vs, whereas before I was struggling to get half-decent brightness with 9Vs.
CircuiTree with wires and resistors, unpowered
Photo by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chebe
CircuiTree with wires and resistors, powered on
Photo by chebe