Yes, once again I am continuing my theme of making things that glow.

Next weekend we’re having a big camp out with a whole bunch of people for my wifes birthday. We wanted to make a bit of an effort since so many people are coming along so we’re going to be carting out the Zen Ball table for everyone to gawp at.

But we also wanted to light up the surrounding camp a bit, and I happen to have a whole bunch of the old style 8mm WS2801 LEDs that happen to look waterproof enough to leave outside overnight while camping in the desert. So…how
to power them?

Thankfully we have a whole bunch of the 6v lantern batteries that we used for our Burning Man bikes last year, and they still seem relatively well charged so I just needed a little box to house all the electronics and hook up the lantern batteries. Thankfully 6v is close enough to 5v that with a bit of voltage drop and a little luck they power the LEDs just fine directly, and the Adafruit Pro Trinket (Hackaday edition!) will happily take in 6v on its Battery+ input so we’re good to go.

A bit of time in CAD and a couple of hours of printing later, and an hour of messing around with bits of wire and crimped cables and a soldering iron and I have a nice little battery pack that will drive a string of 50 LEDs for around 20hours or so. Should be plenty for the weekend. We’ll wrap these around some trees or something, for now I’ve mocked up a horrible substitute for a tree, but it will at least give me some idea of how the animations will look once I put it on a real life lump of living wood.