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Poundland purple gothic death-star hack.

bigclivedotcom 18:19

64,877 views · 3,266 likes Watch on YouTube ↗

This LED tree topper star from Poundland is actually extremely good value for £2. But better still, it is extremely hackable with new LEDs of any colour you can find in an existing string, or you could make up your own custom LED string for it.
In this instance I decided to honour the goth community by turning it into a psychedelic purple gothic death-star using a string of existing Poundland Halloween lights.
This video also shows how you can use a bare USB plug to make up your own USB-LED driver for parallel strings with resistors potted right into a sleeved plug. Alternatively you could chop the connector off an existing USB lead and splice it onto the LED string's wires with a couple of resistors and some thin heatshrink sleeving. The value of resistor can be chosen for the intensity required. Typical choices might be:-
Two 5.6 ohm half watt resistors for 200mA.
Two 10 ohm quarter watt resistors for 100mA.
Two 22 ohm quarter watt resistors for 50mA.
The lights can be powered from a power bank or plug-in USB charger. Note that some power banks will require at least 100mA to stay awake.
The USB plug was the first that looked appropriate out of a bag of eBay PCB mounting plugs and the heatshrink sleeve size is labelled as 12.7mm.

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Category (YouTube): Science & Technology

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