Flashing Christmas Light Fix

[rockychristmas]

Hi All,

I am looking at starting a animated display this year, last Christmas I bought quite a few strings of lights for cheap from Bunnings, and I am just trying to work out how I am going to get it all to work. They all run on 31v, so I was planning on buying a central power supply, putting SSRs out in the yard, cutting the plugs off the leads and going from there. The only drama is that these lights all have one of the multi function controllers as the wall socket and after I cut a plug off and hooked it up to a power supply, one way only half the leds turn on and by reversing polarity the other half turn on. I was just wondering if any of you guys had experience controlling lights like this, I don't really want to have to swap every second led's polarity

Any info would be awesome thanks

 

[bjpc2716]

8)hello mate go to wiki in the forum and their is how to bypass controller and got for mega60 board

 

[rockychristmas]

Hi,

I had a little look at that, it appears to me that will let me turn the power on all the time, but my issue is that there is only 2 wires going out to the LEDs from the controller, and it is by reversing polarity on these 2 wires that I either get one half on or off. By this I mean that every second LED is either on or off depending on polarity, I am guessing that the multi function controller very quickly reverses polarity to make them appear all on at the same time. I was just wondering if anyone knew of any controllers / SSRs with this capability, or am I going to have to swap the polarity of every second LED?

Thanks

 

[SmartAlecLights]

sure there is only 2 wires going to the leds.. normaly there will be 3 or more going to the leds an 2 for the power..
you can cut off the controller (if 3 wires, as one would be positive an 2 will be gnd) the 2 grounds will turn on every odd or every even leds..
you can also take a photo an post it here, as a picture speaks 1000 words

 

[andrewa]

Check out this post from last year re 2 wire polarity lights from bunnings


[SIZE=78%]http://auschristmaslighting.com/forums/index.php?topic=6367.msg57124#msg57124[/SIZE]

 

[fasteddy]

Welcome to ACL. I dont have any of these lights but from what i can understand is that they have LEDs connected in the string with alternating polarity which is how they get the on/off chase effect. If this is how they are then this is what i would do if I wanted to use these with a controller.

The fact that LEDs only conduct electricity in one direction makes them ideal for use with DC volts, but with these strings because the string is wired in a way where LEDs are connected in reverse polarity to get the flashing effect then the only real way i can see to make good use of these is to run them with 24v AC, this will cause a high frequency flicker as the LED turns off every time the frequency changes duirection at 50hz, so by using AC volts instead of DC volts you then will be able to use the whole string

 

[prof]

Sounds like we need to take a trip back to the future and dust the cobwebs off of the old ren-16's and see how they go.