Holiday Brilliant LED Mini Trees. Prime for hacking

[madsci1016]

Bought 3 of these on sale this season (my first).





They are 18 strand LED mini trees, each strand has 8 LEDs on it wired in series. It gets fed by a 24V waterproof wallwart and has a cheap remote to control the functions. Each strand is 'controllable' evident by some circular chase functions. There's also a 19th channel star on top. Whole thing is held up by a 3 point metal frame that comes apart.

Seemed like an easy design that could be hacked. I assumed the electronics would be housed up top and was correct.




I think I'm going to just replace the top PCB with one of my own design, that will have Renard in/out connectors. You could also just hot wire them with LEDancer's setup for 24V.

Does anyone else have these that would be interested in a Renard PCB for them? It would be more cost effective to use LEDancers if you have them, but my craft is PCB design and that's what I like to do!

 

[kingofkya]

You might want to try working out the pin out on that micro could very likely be reprogramable

It could be a pic10 the power pins in the center seam simmaler.

 

[madsci1016]

It's a wired 18 pin SOIC package, only MCUs I can find on Digikey with that package are PIC and Zilog. Even though there's a few Z's on the number printed on it appears to match a PIC18 pinout.

Sigh, I'm not a PIC guy so I'm not tooled for it.

Though I actually dissembled the trees today and noticed there is already some rust marks on the LED legs (they used clear shrink tube) so I'm thinking these won't last many seasons. Not worth getting the whole PCB remade. I may just try making a 'daughter' board that replaces the onboard MCU but still uses the control circuitry to run the LEDs.