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cutting/shortening LED strings


bobalee01

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In the past, all of my strings that I converted were all the same color. I am gearing up to do a mulit color LED wire tree. Many of you might have seen the wire trees that Sears was selling this year. About 5' tall and 350 icans. I am going to pull all of the icans and install per each 50 lamp string, 10 white, 10 green, 10 red, 10 yellow, and 10 blue. It was interesting to see how they fired up on a variable D.C. P.S. Barley turned the voltage up and the green started to illuminate. It was several more volts before the next color started to light and a few more volts and I think most of the others started to light. Point is that just for these colors, one each, I was pushing about 13.4VDC to get 20mA which is what they are rated at. So, with 10 sets I am looking at a dropping voltage of about 134 volts. Going to be an interesting project. Lets see how close my calculated resistor is, and what value I end up with that will give me 15mA RMS. I rather not build something that is going to fail soon cause I didnt take in account of the difference between RMS and Peak.

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I use heat shrink tubing over the unwanted lights on a string. Buy tubing that is a bit larger than the lights, cut it a bit longer than the light, slip it over the light, and use a heat source (blow drier) to shrink it. Works great, and saves cutting the light string. Plus, if you want to use that string elsewhere in the future, you can just cut the heat shrink off the lights.

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I guess not ALL the smart guys left. ;)

I love reading all this stuff that I do not understand. :) It is bringing up all the memories of why I had to go Civil instead of EE. I didn't understand all of that $h!t. :lol:

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Hell Lori, I dont have any sheep skin. Just 2 yrs tech school, 5 yrs radio tech for uncle sam in the A.F. and 25 yrs Numeric Control electrician. And throw in a dash of Ham Radio for fun. Have I burnt things up? Yep! One of my best was when I built a 555 timer in Astable mode with the electrolytic caps in backwards. Ran for a min or two and the caps built up steam and blew the cans off and foil all over the place.

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I have my BA and MA, but those don't help either with understanding anything that was just posted. I'm more than lost. But, on the other hand, if you do make a massive mistake and head to the light show in the sky, I'm more than qualified to preside over your final services. My brain hurts now, I think I need some more coffee and some aspirin.

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Boy, someone throws out an innocent rabbit and the pack of techie dogs have a lot of fun chasing it and nipping at each other in the pursuit.

Glad to know there's plenty of engineers out there to answer (or over-answer) our technical questions.

It was a fun romp through old engineering memories, but I'm not sure the original poster got the answer they wanted in a nutshell.

My opinion was to buy a LED string slightly bigger than you need and put heat shrink over the ones you don't want.

The cost of the LED string is a bit less than the college classes you would need to understand the dialog above.

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Boy, someone throws out an innocent rabbit and the pack of techie dogs have a lot of fun chasing it and nipping at each other in the pursuit. We didn't actually rip each other.. twas a friendly Q&A, just a bit deeper then need be.. I got side tracked.. B)

Glad to know there's plenty of engineers out there to answer (or over-answer) our technical questions. Guilty as charged.. :P

It was a fun romp through old engineering memories, but I'm not sure the original poster got the answer they wanted in a nutshell.

My opinion was to buy a LED string slightly bigger than you need and put heat shrink over the ones you don't want.

The cost of the LED string is a bit less than the college classes you would need to understand the dialog above. :lol::rolleyes:He is right though..

Edited by plasmadrive
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Look at Ken the smooth talker, LOL. There are more than one way to skin a cat. But somethings can not be changed and there are consequences for taking short cuts. And it is just the nature of man to always in a large group to find a few who will disagree with others. Just the nature of the beast. Disagreement in of its self is not a bad thing. But sometimes certain factors come into play. Short on sleep, sharp word, words that leave one with two meanings. And temper flare. That is no long a healthy discussion.

This discussion has been fun for me. Even though I had a lapse with the 1.414 and had on purpose typed 1.418. I did not take abridge to being corrected. Memory is going at an early age of 54. I hate to think of how much info I have not used and have forgotten. Heck I used to know all of the 7400 series from 7401 to 74156 or was it 74158.

We need these discussions to refresh our memory. So for the newbies, forgive us old farts hashing it out again for memory sake.

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This discussion has been fun for me. Even though I had a lapse with the 1.414 and had on purpose typed 1.418. I did not take abridge to being corrected. Memory is going at an early age of 54. I hate to think of how much info I have not used and have forgotten. Heck I used to know all of the 7400 series from 7401 to 74156 or was it 74158.

We need these discussions to refresh our memory. So for the newbies, forgive us old farts hashing it out again for memory sake.

74xxx... OMG! I was running an electronics surplus store back then... you do go way back! Aaahhhh those were the days... not sure what they were the days for.. but those were the days.. :blink:

You and I are about the same age... Ok.. my hair is about 2 years greyor then yours... but close!!

As for memory...,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, aaahhh.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,. what was it we were talking about??? :P

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