These dinky little things are described as meteor shower, flowing water, lights and if you've seen the classic uh, sort of falling snow, meteor icicle type effect, this is the whole thing on one tiny little circuit board with about 20 LEDs on it. It's quite neat. The units came from AliExpress and I'll give you a link to it, but uh, when you get the link and and you follow the though, lots of other sellers shop about to get the best price. They're available in various lengths.

I Chose the longer one. Um, and they're available in uh, various shades of white: a yellow, a green, a red, and a blue. I Chose a blue one because the blue one H is basically they're all blue, but they have gel to convert with phosphor in it over them to actually convert the color. I CH a blue because it's clear gel and therefore we could see the circuitry underneath and trace it out.

And it is very, very simple. Um, if I show you a picture now, notice that these are all just Wen parallel. They run at 3 volts. Uh, the current is very low.

It's at most about 10 milliamps each on average, but it's continually. it's just changing all the time. Very hard to get a specific current. You may be able to use these in 5 volts if you have wanted to make a string of basically dripping lights.

uh, but 5 volts but using a resistor in series to limit the current to sensible level. However, even at a low current, if I start turning this down fact, it's only just. well. let's measure the voltage.

Let's measure the voltage right now cuz those are just barely glowing. So I'll set this to the 20 Volt range and I shall stick it across these and it's starting to Glow at approximately 2.45 volt, that's quite low and it's a sensible level. I'll nudge back at that. No.

I'll go I'll try and get 3 volts on the button. Let's see what what we get here. 2.97 volts. That's good enough.

So um, under at that? Uh yeah, it's it's bouncing the current, bouncy up and down. It's peing. It's very hard to say because you know there's three in parallel, all drawing current little burst. It's not something you can easily measure the current, but the main thing is they will operate at very low voltage.

Um, here is a picture of the circuit board. Let me just turn these off. so I don't short them out and I shall Focus down onto the Z bench and we'll zoom in in this so you can see what's on the actual circuit board itself. So on the circuit board we have a little 8pin microcontroller.

It's got the same pin out as the classic P 12 type microcontroller and then it's got the 20 LEDs but they're configured as 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, and two and I think that so that as it snows down, it actually ends up in a sort of brighter dot at the end. Because at because as for in series and the there'll be sort of inherent current Lim in the chip. Uh, these ones will be dimmer, slightly brighter and then it ends on a sort of brighter note. Well, let's turn the the power on again.

let's see what those look like. Do you see the sort of brighter glimmer at the end? Maybe it's not that visible. They do seem to I think they've got a feeding effect. It's very simple, very neat.

And the Led the microcontroller should have say at the end is you could theoretically take that off and replace it with something with your own code if you wanted. Now, it's interesting to note that the LEDs on one side they're just the flip chip LEDs but they put gel phosphor in both sides. It's not actually needed on the other side of this one. Does it come off easily? Let's just run a knife.

let's just stab myself. Let's use a blunt blade to just basically gouge the clear uh gel off one side that is not working right. Let's not do that. Then an impromptu thing that went wrong.

Um, but the main thing is the reason they put the J on both sides is because some blue light will shine through the back of the circuit board. Uh, let's turn them on again and see it gluing through the back of the circuit board. Oh, somehow I've turned the voltage down. There we go.

You can see it glowing through the back of the circuit board and that would also stimulate Fos. From the other side, it's going to be much brighter in the front. he said shorting it out. Uh, but then it's going to be dimmer in the back, but it's still going to make the phosphor exciting.

It's still visible as blue light. Just a bit dimmer because it's being diffused through the circuit board. Let's take a look at the schmatic. oh things worth noting: Uh.

negative is got a tiny little negative symbol here and the other one is positive. H Make sure you connect up the correct polarity. It's absolutely death to these chips if you connect the poity the wrong way on them because they use their protective D diodes and the diodes usually pass huge quantities of current and then they short out and then it is dead. Maybe you could blow it clear? Not sure.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Here's your 3vt supply. Comm in the positive goes to the Uh microcontroller, just draw the the missing track in. but also the negative also goes to the microcontroller.

Uh, no decoupling capacitor anything. they're just relying on the microcontroller being fairly stable and then the clusters of LEDs are just in parallel. Uh, three sets of for two setss of three and then one set of two just connected to the microcontroller and being pulled to the Zer volt rail. uh by the internal impedance of the little Moss fet outputs.

The little fat outputs might be our way to describe that, but that is it. They're neat little things I could see uses for these. They're not that expensive. It does work out roughly a dollar per circuit board if you buy a a bunch of them.

Um, and that's all right. it's good for sort of playing about with. So there we have it. It could be nice to make them little circles or fans or things like that.

They would either have their random randomness or by basically just glitching the power to them ever so often. You could keep them in Syn, or even chase them so that they actually fanned out in a sort of spiral. Um, lots of possibilities. But there we have it.

the interesting little meteor icicle, meteor shower type running water. They've got so many names for these. uh, lights from AliExpress Very interesting little things. well worth playing with.