LED Cherry Blossom Trees

[ryebred]

Last year we had a large traveling show come to our area from China with a bunch of lights and giant lanterns and they had these really pretty color changing LED cherry blossom trees. I did a search for these and came up with a bunch of results but all were in China. You could pay several hundred to a thousand dollars to purchase these trees from China and pay double that amount in shipping and then if something went wrong, good luck with that.

However, I found these this year in the U.S.

This is a 7.5 foot cherry blossom tree

http://www.batteryop...-led-trees.html

And this is a 6.5 foot willow tree

http://www.batteryop...-led-trees.html

Amazon has them also and home depot and a few other places. I am assuming these are half wave LED's and they have an AC to DC transformer on the end of the lead. So, I am not too sure how well they will work with LOR. I am not a fan of the half wave flicker and they probably wont fade well. These are also one color and do not change colors but the incandescent tree they would be replacing is all one color now as it is.

Does anyone have any experience with these or similar all-LED trees? I am almost tempted to buy their 6.5 foot cherry blossom tree to try it out for $160 and if it works good then add the bigger ones.

[ryebred]

Couple of LED questions related to these trees.

1.) Can any LED set be made to be full wave? I seem to recall reading about someone soldering together 4 diodes that they attached before the plug to make an LED set full wave.

2.) If an LED was made to be full wave, would that improve dimming performance or are these two factors unrelated?

3.) Some trees say they have color changing LEDS. Presumably they have a controller attached that rotates the colors in a set timeframe. If you cut off this controller and hooked it up to a LOR DC board, could you control the colors on the LED's like an RGB set of LED's?

[Ron Boyd]

I can answer the first question,

1.) Can any LED set be made to be full wave? I seem to recall reading about someone soldering together 4 diodes that they attached before the plug to make an LED set full wave

http://forums.planetchristmas.com/index.php?/topic/36988-easiest-terminatorssnubbers-to-make/

IF I remember correctly, the snubbers take care of the flicker associated with half wave. Also, I think it also helps with the dimming.

Take a look at this thread. there are som good info there. Took care of my question which was very similar to yours:

http://forums.lightorama.com/index.php?/topic/16482-full-vshalf-wave-leds/