I bought some Christmas light strings last week thinking they might work with a Pixelblaze controller and lucked out!
The product is marketed by enbrighten and is described as ‘Color-changing LED Bubble Lights’ and sold at Costco (ITM. 1785039) for CAD$ 29.95 ($10.00 less than last week!). These are now out of stock online and will be de-listed as each store’s stock sells out.
Each box contains two strings of bubble lights, 90 LEDs per 29.5 foot string, two 120V/5V power supplies, two controllers and two remotes.
It is a very simple conversion to Pixelblaze; cut the wires after the controller, connect the copper-colored wire to 5V, center wire to Data and the remaining wire is Ground. The wire insulation is clear, so this is very easy to see. There is no indication on the packaging as to exactly what type of string they are, but they work perfectly on the WS2812 setting in Pixelblaze with a color order of BGR.
The strings are rated indoor/outdoor and appear to be of decent quality, the bubbles (diffusers) don’t have a visible seam and look quite waterproof. The diffusers work very well, they are easy on the eyes and the colors are nicely saturated. As is typical of WS2812 strings, slow fades are not flicker-free. You can connect both strings to one power supply and controller giving you a 59 foot string. There are no options for making longer runs straight out of the box, but with wire cutters and power injection you could make longer runs if needed. The 180 pxl string on our tree is on Day 5 at app. 8 hours per day, running on a 20,000 mAh battery bank.
After hacking, installing a far superior controller, and one week on our Christmas tree, I would give this product a 4.5 star rating.
Now, I just have to tackle my first 3D mapping project 