Christmas lights driven by music

I've just seen the Beer commercial (Miller Lite I think) where the christmas lights all around a house were pulsed on and off to a tune by Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
**broken link removed**
Entire strings of lights would go on and off to the tune.
Any concepts on how to make this work in real life.
I envision about 30 to 50 strings which I already put out on display every year.
Driven by relays possibly. (R40-11d2-12 driven by uln 2003 perhaps)
I'm an electrician so the power side is easy.

I have some experience with PicBasic pro and 16f876 so the use of a micro is possible.

This would be a cool project for 2006.

Theres already a few posts about this...https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/anyone-noticed-this.19295/
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/did-i-learn.19238/

Pretty soon everybody and their brother is going to have a setup like that... :shock:

I'm sure the companies that make the big computer-run light sequencing controllers like you use for those are pretty happy about the publicity though :lol:

What you'd need to do is decide on how many channels, so to speak, you want. You'd also need to decide on what you'll use to trigger the lights - amplitude of sound or frequency or both.

Things I might consider is whether or not to go from fully "off" to fully "on" as you might get with relays. Now with diodes and relays you could go to a half power mode (if AC to the lights) - diode in series with power keeps filaments warm/hot but maybe not lit. Maybe theres some sense to modulating a string of lights from dimmer to brighter for a better effect rather than just on/off.

A thought might be to separate the music with filters into bands then run each string from dim to bright based on the momentary amplitude of a particular band. This might be something to evolve to - build the filters to trigger relays then develop it to drive some sort of PWM or linear power control for each channel. You'd probably run AC if you used triacs but might use DC (at line voltage) with other methods.

Back to the bulbs, you may be able to make the initial pulse a bit higher when the light comes on, than you would normally run the filament at without hurting the bulbb too much. Let me explain a little. When the bulb is at design max continuous voltage it will shine brightly if the applied voltage is at that constantly. You might take the voltage up above that by 5 or 10% but only for a few milliseconds - enough to put a little more twinkle in it - then drop the voltage for the rest of the "on" cycle to the rated voltage. That would require some additional work but maybe the PIC can do that easily.

Does sound like a fun project. Too late for this Christmas but something to work on for next.

ronjodu said:

I've just seen the Beer commercial (Miller Lite I think) where the christmas lights all around a house were pulsed on and off to a tune by Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
**broken link removed**
Entire strings of lights would go on and off to the tune.
Any concepts on how to make this work in real life.
I envision about 30 to 50 strings which I already put out on display every year.
Driven by relays possibly. (R40-11d2-12 driven by uln 2003 perhaps)
I'm an electrician so the power side is easy.

I have some experience with PicBasic pro and 16f876 so the use of a micro is possible.

This would be a cool project for 2006.

Click to expand...

Do a Google search for a "Color Organ".
Also check out the one in the projects area of my website link below.
These Color Organs light up the lights, relative to the various frequencies in the music.

thanks

Thanks for the replies. Plenty here to get me going.
My last project was a success with the help from this forum, I'm sure to lean on you guys again for this one.

For those interested this is a link to the software package demo the guy used for his display. Looks like this will be difficult to do with a pic and some relays.

**broken link removed**