A look inside some common ebay home disco or party tornado lights. These lights have 48 individually controlled red, green and blue LEDs around the perimeter that project beams of light out onto the surface they are on. The lights are sequenced by chasing every third LED for a single colour effect or combinations for multi-colour effects.
The unit uses an anonymous 8-pin microcontroller to feed the pattern data to a string of six cascaded 74HC595 serial to parallel shift registers, probably using a clock, data and store line to load in the full 48 bits of data before latching them to the outputs.
A microphone is used with a bit of support circuitry to allow audio transients to pulse one of the processor pins to reverse the direction of the pattern. (It took me a while to realise what that mic was for)
The mains operated version uses a neat HOTCHIP 3 pin switchmode driver with minimal support circuitry. The blue "class Y" style capacitor is not for RF suppression, but is part of the primary winding transient snubber network. (A diode passing the reverse spikes to the capacitor which then has a discharge resistor across it.)
These lights plus some other interesting stuff were sent to me by Judd, who is an Australian living in China. He has an Alibaba shop at http://www.anboge.com/ or the direct link is:- http://anboge.en.alibaba.com/
You can contact him via the message box at the bottom of that page. Judd is a native English speaker which will help greatly if you need any specific Chinese products.
The unit uses an anonymous 8-pin microcontroller to feed the pattern data to a string of six cascaded 74HC595 serial to parallel shift registers, probably using a clock, data and store line to load in the full 48 bits of data before latching them to the outputs.
A microphone is used with a bit of support circuitry to allow audio transients to pulse one of the processor pins to reverse the direction of the pattern. (It took me a while to realise what that mic was for)
The mains operated version uses a neat HOTCHIP 3 pin switchmode driver with minimal support circuitry. The blue "class Y" style capacitor is not for RF suppression, but is part of the primary winding transient snubber network. (A diode passing the reverse spikes to the capacitor which then has a discharge resistor across it.)
These lights plus some other interesting stuff were sent to me by Judd, who is an Australian living in China. He has an Alibaba shop at http://www.anboge.com/ or the direct link is:- http://anboge.en.alibaba.com/
You can contact him via the message box at the bottom of that page. Judd is a native English speaker which will help greatly if you need any specific Chinese products.
So they still have Discos in Scotland? They left Canada in the late 70s.
wonder if you could hack it to run off 18650 or lipo?
Clive said it might be a 4094, but I was betting it was a 595. So it was even more suspenseful when he looked at the ICs.
Unfortunately the battery powered version seems to be no more available anywhere.
And the website mentioned in this video is also gone.
Big Clive's being silly wanted to mount the bare board on the wall! <turns on light> Oh, crap! He's right! It does look better! 😛
Ooh! NBC color television! I was really young in the early '80s, but I do remember them saying that a program was in color.
Neat item and I will have to get some.
'
i have 2 sunflower LED lights with black plastic cases…
where to get clear and white plastic case
74HC595 is an oldy-but-goody. The Intel 8051 databook c. 1985(?) describes an entire automotive light controller using them for all signal lamps, including half-brightness PWM for the parking lamp function. I have used them for I/O expansion on a number of industrial and commercial products. They are especially useful for LEDs, since they are buffered, with, as you point out, a buffered 'store' function, which allows you to shift out bits without causing the LEDs to flicker, and then clock the output registers simultaneously. Good stuff…
Could you make a chaser clock?
How modable are these lights?
I so want one of these 😀
I had a look for the HT1608 chip, as I was curious, but the first one I found was the Holtek HT1608, which is (surprise) an LED driver. Then I found the Hotchips HT1608 which is, of course, a little switchmode power supply controller in a 3-pin package. So it would be possible to use two different HT1608 chips to implement one of these.
F*ck peeling the label off, I'll just stick the sh1tty screwdriver through it 😉
That is pretty rad. The Chinese and Korean late bars in Dublin always have amazing lighting systems.