Meanwhile, if you’re wondering how the older-style lights used to twinkle, we’ve covered that before too. Using a faster microcontroller should net reliable performance with longer strings. Using an Arduino Uno or Leonardo, reports its possible to twinkle 300 individual LEDs at a rate of over 50 updates a second. To create the twinkling effect, each LED has its own unique clock signal, so they vary in brightness at different times and at different rates. The Arduino is programmed to vary the brightness of each LED according to a triangle wave function. demo setup is built around using WS2811 LEDs, put together in a string with plastic diffusers on each bulb. The program is known as TwinkleFOX, and relies on the popular FastLED library for addressable LEDs. To rectify this, some time ago, built an Arduino program that makes LEDs twinkle beautifully. LEDs, with their hard-on and hard-off nature, aren’t naturally predisposed to such behavior. You should now be able close the second half of the tray, to keep the slide in place.Old-school filament-based Christmas lights used to be available in twinkling form. The metal pen I used didn't seem to suffer any ill affects. I had to fix a plastic pen's hole so my multi-color twist pen would work smoothly again. Align the slide's holes with the tabs, now one by one push the pen over the slide holes and onto the alignment tabs. Find a pen that is able to fit over the alignment tabs. Using a retractable pen became the solution. Later I used a drill bit, with a brad point, and turned that in place with my hands (the drill caused more harm than good, but turning the bit by hand worked very well).īetween the holes not being perfect and the plastic being less forgiving (than the paper), the slides needed some additional help to seat into the trays. For a few I used a sharp knife, and turned the point to cut a hole. The paper clip method didn't work through the plastic transparency.

With the paper tests, I was able to poke thru the paper with a paper clip. I need to cut matching holes in the slides so they can fit over those tabs (which I marked in red on my template). My projector slide trays have three alignment tabs. If you're using the same slide projector as I am, you can skip this step and just use the template I've already created. Otherwise the new slides kind of bunched up a little when inserted into the trays. Note: later I found the plastic transparency was less forgiving than the paper test prints, and needed to trim the sides slightly. I duplicated the object many times so that I could fill an entire 8 1/2' x 11' page with them. And a separate layer for the images I'll add in the next step.An invisible/printable layer (all black to make sure the background is black).I have a visible/printable layer for part of the template.With the dimensions correct I grouped parts of the object and assigned it to a layer. I used a paper clip to make holes in the printed paper tests to fit over those alignment tabs.Īfter many test prints and tweaks to the dimensions, I finalized the template.

So a little extra work now, may save you time later. but, they help align the slide into the tray. I supposed you could snap those off, to make the process easier. Pay attention to any protrusions, like the three raised parts. You'll want the same shape so the slide will fit inside the tray.

I then recreated it as a template in Visio. I used a digital caliber to check the dimensions of the slide. The version I'm using has two little plastic tabs that need to be pried open. I'm used to using Microsoft Visio, but any SVG editor should work just as well. 1st step was determining the size of the slides inside the trays, and making a template.

Diy christmas light projector