I mentioned in a prior post (Cuttle makes Score instead of Engrave Easy) I was working on a Holiday Village, and needed some room “in the middle” to run wires for the LEDS.
It’s done - each tree / house has three to five 3mm LEDs, powered off a USB Fairy Light controller (mostly because I wanted an easy power source, and why not have blinking lights).
The fairy lights had half the LEDs “backwards”, so they could run 2 wires and with time multiplexing, send either 3V / Gnd or Gnd / 3V so that all the lights could appear on, or do things in 2 groups, so I re-used that and have the houses wired in one group (Red / Black is 3V / Gnd), and the trees the other way (Red / Black is Gnd / 3V). Looks nice in person, and does not film well on my smart phone, so the video showing the 2 groups in use is very not awesome!
Long story short - the laser cutting / assembly was pretty straight forward. Wiring was a huge PITA, trying to use connectors instead of soldering, failing hard, and then soldering in small areas. Good news is I’m trying to think up ways to make it easier on me to do one next year (making PCBs for inside the houses / trees), which then might make it easy enough to use a microcontroller (probably Arduino), to switch over to RGB LEDs and some more interesting patterns / modes.