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Lowes Gemmy LED Color Changing Lights


Rick Ouellet

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4 red and 4 green bulbs in each one. When all 8 bulbs are on, they become white. In order to get "white", you need some blue LED's. It looks "white" through the camera, mixing red and green gives you a yellowish color.

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Okay fellow LOR users,

I am new hear and this will be my first year with LOR. Already i have an issue and i think i am in the right chat room for some help. I purchased some fairy led stars and webs to put on my roof. They claimed them waterproof but when i recieved them it was clear that the 8 way motion controller was not waterproof. I wrote the out of states company and i get nowhere with them at all. Is there anyway to eliminate the controller and just straight wire the lights? I am sure there is probably something in there to reduce the amps going to these little lights but not sure.

I also have falling snowflakes with motion controllers on that i would love to bypass. My LOR is going to do all the work for me. Besides the controllers reset to the first selection each time power is cut off. I am surely not going to climb on the roof and onto the second story everynight to reset the lights.

Any help would greatly be appreciated!!!!

Kim

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kim do a search of the site and you may find the answers you speak, I aint no electrician but did ask this question in an aussie forum as we have differences to the USA and i was helped after supplying pics of the pcb inside the controller and was a simple case of soldering 2 points together so that it bypasses the control part of the controller and the lights are now steady on. Some of my lights have a memory and it remembers the last setting, the other thing is that a lot of our lights in Australia run off step down transformers, so they really only run on 12-24vac.

Happy lighting :D

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Hey Robbo,

I have searched everyway possible and the only chat i found was back in 2006. It was a user wanting to use them to chase up and down a pole. They told him they would run fine on the full on position. But i am being informed by a very reliable source that a problem will probably surface when i try to fade them up or down. That eventually the controller will fail.

You dont happen to have a link to the site you mentioned?

Thanks for the info!!!

Kim

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I'm not sure if the site i mentioned will be of help to you Kim, as I also mentioned Australia is and can be very different to the USA, for starters we run off 240V hence the reason why we use step down transformers to produce 12 or 24 voltage to low voltage lights. No matter what I would say you will have to take the controller apart and do a bit of soldering, but being no expert I cant guarantee that either. Details of the lights and possible pictures may help

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  • 1 month later...

Now back to our regularly scheduled posts….

Hacking the Gemmy LightShow lights

I have two strings of the swirl lollypops, which have been selected to be hacked.

In case you’re not familiar with the Gemmy lightshow products, check out

http://www.gemmy.com/product.cfm?productId=80381

or the You Tube video at



First I need to ask some questions to myself:

What light controller are you going to use: LOR

What do you intend make these lights do with LOR:

Minimum; Let LOR control multiple strings together, on/off together.
Now, multiple LightShow light strings connected together will sync their program
to each other with in 60 seconds of power being applied.

Best choice scenario; Let LOR completely control the colors and/or effects with out
being a LOR channel monster.

What is your budget: Next to nothing

Stay tuned……
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I believe these are the "stars" Ron showed at the 2007 PLUS. I believe he just has a red and green bulbs inside each coroplast star. He did a class on them and if I'm remembering it right, I think he used both colors to get his white, I don't think there were 3 bulbs....

Oops... just like everone else has said and I, too, jumped in before scrolling to the last post. Sorry

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  • 8 months later...
  • 2 months later...

Sorry, about leaving everyone hanging from my last post.

Each light “fixture” on the Gemmy Light Show color changing lights has its own program chip. The program chip and circuit, controls the on and off (and dimming) function of 3 separate color LEDs, red, green and blue. The chip turns on different combinations of LEDs colors thus mixing them to create different colors when viewed through a diffuser lens (the plastic covering). Since each fixture has its own chip, hacking the whole string would not be cost (time and money) effective. Since you would have to work on each fixture separately. At the beginning of the Gemmy string is the power supply and other circuitry. Hacking the plug end would also not be beneficial, since the only result would be an on/off function.

I purchased my Gemmy strings after Christmas, so I may just scrap the original design and use the plastic fixtures alone with my LEDs and control circuitry.

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yes I looked at my two sets. One is the red and white perment hard candy and the other is of santa's face with a little red cap attached at the time. The power supply does two things. One provieds a lowered DC voltage and a "Data line" to each lamp module. I believe this data line is just a low voltage 60Hz wire. This is then divided down to represent seconds. Then the program in the chip on each lamp board as Vic stated is what tells what LED to turn on and at what intentisity. To make it useful I think this is what will need to happen. First you will need to run new wires to each unit. You will need 4 wires to each unit. A common, red, blue, and green. Then you will need to cut the trace of each LED going back to (been a while) a transistor and then wire the hot lead to the resistor before the LED. And find a good place to attach the common return wire.

As for me, I am going to gut the old light system (done). Install a C9 socket and drill a hole so the SPT1 wire can get out of the base (done). And then install a dimmable C9 bulb when they arrive (have them on order).

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