LED X-Mas lights at target

[mahuti]

With all of this talk about LED lights... Has anyone looked at the LED lights at target? There are big strands of 'em... I didn't know if it would be possible to take 'em apart and reuse them. I only took an idle glance at them.

[Tim]

Well without giving me too hard of a time.. I work for a Walmart here in Canada, on their nightcrew. We have display boxes for these Xmas lights and just toss them away. They contain 8 diffrent colors from white, blue to all the regular colors.  Anyways after the third one was tossed out I asked my manager if I can have them for my arcade project.. well I have 40 sets now and 120 AA batteries.. hell Im getting off track..

Anyways I use my dremmel with a cut off disk and cut right through the base/socket if you will. Takes a few seconds. Im left with about 5mm of legs left over so this saves me from having to trim them anyways. I guess it would depend on who made it but the LEDs I have are about 3mm wide and 5 mm tall.

Im unsure if there is any internal resistors built in them so I'm going to run a resistor in series anyways.

Incase anyone is wondering.. Im going side light my plexi CP with either some instructions and or button/control names. I can't remember who did it but the guy carved Space Invaders into plexi for his showcase machine and I fell in love with it.

Tim

[Necro]

Just saw this over at digg.com:
http://www.starshipmodeler.com/tech/cj_xmas.htm

[mahuti]

nice link.

[Necro]

Only thing is, as someone was posting over at Digg in the comments on the story, is that these are def. not 'high quality' LEDS (the guy had one burn out over 48hrs of constant use).

Getting certain colors in bulk may end up being cheaper/more reliable, depending on how many you need.