News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: A high-tech floating Christmas tree with more th... by jwatte on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @07:23PM (#10781274)
Nice! I just put eight meters of dotstars in my tree, but that's only 480 rgb LEDs. And indoors :-)

Did you consider DC/DC regulators for stabilizing 12V? 10A per bus could be done with inexpensive boards?

Re:Show HN: A high-tech floating Christmas tree with more th... by chrlilje on Wednesday December 23, 2015 @04:39AM (#10782637)
That was a mistake by me in the design process - I simply forgot, that the charge voltage of battery systems are 14.7 V - And when I tested the diodes, they were not very happy getting more than 13 V.

We should have gotten a stack of cheap DC-DC converters to keep the voltage at 12 V for each strand of Diodes. But we realized the mistake too late for another Aliexpress-order, so we just had to go with a solution with parts from our stock.

..next year we will have lots of better ways to do things.