Recall Post #1906. I’m trying to find a modern energy-efficient version of old-fashioned Christmas tree “twinkle lights”. That is, light strings where each bulb turns on and off, randomly, independent of all the other bulbs.
After reviewing the options, I bought a set of Twinkly Strings®. While these are waaay cooler than any Christmas lights I’ve ever owned, they do not, in fact, faithfully reproduce old-fashioned twinkle lights.
The sad but colorful story ensues. The twinkle quest continues.
There’s an app for that.
After reviewing my options in the prior post, I decided to take a flyer on the latest whiz-bang offering in Christmas lights: Twinkly Strings.
These are more-or-less everything I never wanted in Christmas lights. The product I bought is a string of 100 individually-addressable color-changing LEDs, internet connected, app controlled, and programmable.
And, by golly, the maker said they could be set to twinkle.
My next-best alternative for energy-efficient twinkle lights was a set of fixed-color LEDs that twinkled. My thinking was, why settle for that one-trick pony when, for a few dollars more, I could have not just twinkle lights, but so much more.
To be clear, to me, these lights are nothing short of amazing. They come with about 50 pre-programmed patterns, such as “Rainbow” shown at the top of the post. You can edit and create new patterns. Speed them up, slow them down. Change the colors. Draw pictures on the screen with your finger. You can arrange your favorites in a crude playlist.
Most impressively, the app figures out the physical location of each LED. You can put these light strings up willy-nilly, then the app takes a short video while it flashes the lights, after which it knows where each individual LED is located. That’s how the app can create horizontal strips of color, above, even though I’ve looped the strings vertically over a stair rail.
If you have enough of them to pack the lights fairly densely, you can use them as pixels. Give it a .jpg file, and you can see that image in lights, courtesy of the Twinkly app.
But what they don’t do is twinkle. Not in the sense that I’m looking for, with each bulb turning on and off independently.
Here’s the pre-programmed twinkle option. If I play it fast enough, it does a fair imitation of frenetic twinkling.
But that’s way too fast for the old-time effect I want. And when I slow it down, it’s obvious that it’s “platooning” the bulbs. At each tick of the clock, many bulbs change in lockstep. This is nothing like the independent, random twinkle of old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, each controlled by its own bimetallic strip.
The effect is mechanical, rather than the almost organic twinkling of the independently-flashing twinkle bulbs of times gone by. It’s interesting, but it’s not what I’m looking for. Nor can I figure out how to make them twinkle independently, given the programming tools within the app.
At least I understand the technology. Each LED sits on its own little circuit board, and has a unique address on the string. Unlike traditional Christmas lights, the wires consist of the power leads, and a twisted-pair data bus. The controller is a little computer, sending out commands over the bus to turn the individual LEDS on and off (and so on), based on each LED’s unique address on the bus. And the computer knows where each LED is, physically, because it has already figured that out from the setup video mentioned above.
Individually-addressable LED light strings like this have been available for some time now, but have been the purview of those willing to put in the programming hours to program a controller to generate the patterns of interest. These Twinkly lights are the pre-programmed app-controlled E-Z version of such lights.
I don’t regret buying them. You need to buy yourself a toy now and again, even as an adult. But Twinkly Strings, for all their capabilities, don’t twinkle like old-fashioned twinkle lights.
My search continues.
