Ask HN: How hard would it be to make an open hardware prelit xmas tree? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How hard would it be to make an open hardware prelit xmas tree?

2 pointsleetrout5 comments

I was reading the thread about repairable household items(0) and I was thinking how frustrating it was trying to get support for my prelit RGB LED tree this year.

I took everything apart but I am not good at identifying circuit components but I suspected things would be easier to diagnose and repair or replace with a little more open info from the manufacturer but that is unlikely.

Does this seem like something that could realistically be done by a group of amateurs? Or maybe a kickstarter to pay for professional electrical engineering and just making everything open?? Seems like these artificial trees are over priced and there should be a way to reduce the cost.

Maybe just open hardware lights and light controllers?

(0) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148219

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If you can find a tree with programmable RGP pixels, all you need is to remove their controller and wire it to an espixelstick. Then flash it with WLED.

https://forkineye.com/espixelstick-v3/

https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED

Very cool. My tree is in 3 sections and there are built in shows that do address individual LEDs...

Any thoughts on how to reverse engineer it to figure out how it is talking to the LEDs? I do not have an oscilloscope or other EE type tools.

If by individual LEDs you definitely mean individual and not runs of 3 LEDs, then I would:

- flash WLED onto an ESP8266

- solder a data output and power lines to the LED strip

- go through the list of LED options in WLED until one worked

- try displaying Red, Green, and Blue to confirm that the RGB order was right

It would be pretty rare (I guess) to find a tree that was using a truly custom addressable LED strip with its own protocol

On a basic technical level, it would be not difficult at all. IMO the challenge would be in getting enough critical mass to make the manufacturing cost effective, and getting enough people to reasonably believe there would be future support for it, therefore making it an attractive consideration for purchase.

So the issue is not the technology so much as the distribution and marketing of it.

Knowing how to repair a prelit tree is key to designing a repairable prelit tree.

So to me, your first hurdle toward making what you are talking about would be learning to use a soldering iron, multi-meter, micro-controller programming to a level that you can fix a tree like yours without manufacturer support.

To me, that sounds like a lot of work over a non-trivial time window. Which is to say, the difficulty of making what you are thinking of is non-trivial. But that's almost always the answer to "How hard could it be?" ideas.

Yes, there are people for whom it would be of little difficulty. Those people would not need to ask because they would know how hard it would be and it would only be a choice of if it was worth the bother.

Good luck.

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