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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Build something else. Whatever it is that you build you end up with that awesome "I built that" feeling. Last night I hacked to 0230 on turning a set of 50 GE Color Effects Christmas lights into a 7x7 color display. No one around me really understands why this was worth staying up half the night for, but when I finally got control of the serial bus protocol for programming the lights and saw my display work under my control it was awesome.

What they looked like before I started hacking them: http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11630618

Short video of the first full glitch free run of the lights under my control: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9SOI9EnjTg

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At Twin Cities Maker a few of our members are undergoing a project to turn these into a large color changing glass block wall. It's been a pretty cool project to watch.

http://www.tcmaker.org/wiki/doku.php?id=projects:led_signboa...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eagletusk/6259626384/

We used shiftbrites in our 7x8 window at Hive13 adnd it worked out very nicely. Last week we got it working with OSC and Processing - http://www.hive13.org/?p=527 - which should make connecting to it with a wide variety of software pretty easy.

That looks great. Will you be posting any info about how you did this?

Yes, I will. When I've got it doing something useful I will post a full blog post with details and also with the source code etc.

Some more pictures to give you the idea:

1. All the LEDs removed from the cable and stuck into a specially drilled piece of thin plywood: http://yfrog.com/hwy2snj

2. Reverse of the plywood showing the bulb with all the cables cut. Had to cut, strip and solder all 288 cables back in place: http://yfrog.com/j2xp8gsj

3. Little shot of the rewiring on the back. The colored pieces are tiny bits of heatshrink that I put in place to insulate everything: http://yfrog.com/nzh3ngdj

Here's a good post from someone hacking these Christmas lights, and reverse engineering the protocol: http://www.deepdarc.com/2010/11/27/hacking-christmas-lights/

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