Modifying my swedish candleholder

We have a few of the classic swedish electric candleholder made in wooed, the stairs type, with 7 lights in it.
I will modify it with WS2812B LED’s (individually addressable), and WLED as the controller.

The candle holder with the small WS2812B on indidivual pcb’s.

Unscrew the feet, and remove the thin plate covering the inside

All the old 220V wires cut, and ready for further cleaning up

Bending one of the copperplates so I can grab it with a thin set of pliers

The pliers in action

The inside of the ‘candle’ pulled out.

7 LED’s and 14 wires (the only ones I had that were thin enough was black and red)

5v and gnd wired in, that will go to a ‘power bus’ in the base, and then the in and out datachannel set up, the red is in, and the black is out.

Then the signal wire is marked with a silverpen, to make sure they are not confused.

The LED is mounted in the inside holder, fits perfectly

The signal wires are put aside for later, so the power bus can be created.

The powerbus is created, the connection is in parallel, and the signal channel is connected, with red as input, and then the black out, connected to the next led’s red input.

The LED’s mounted inside the candles

The cable restraint is mounted again.

The candle assembled, and everything is working.

Now for the final touch, the bulbs glas has to be seperated from the metal.

7 pieces of glas, most of them went well, two got minor breaks, but that will not be visible when they are mounted

The final result

And then the ESP32 mounted on a Dig Uno board from quinled.info

I have three of these, and two of them are now converted, it takes quite a few hours, so the last of them is for next session :slight_smile:

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It would be nice to see a video how they work after the upgrade.

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Hi @Molodax

Mostly I will be running them with the ‘candle’ effect, but here are some examples.

I can’t upload videos here, so I’ve put some short ones on youtube:

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Vad kul!
Really nice, I need to modify my lights for the next season too :slight_smile:

Tack så mycket, it took me 4 hours to do one :slight_smile: I’m not the fastest solderer, and then after that, two hours of debugging :smiley: I had a broken cable, and when I fixed that I made a short on the signal :roll_eyes:
I think that before I do the last one, I will revert the way the cable is soldered to the LED, so that the cables point inwards, I think that will do better space management.

So now I’ve mounted proper LED plugs on them, so it’s more ‘pro’, and I’ve also swapped the esp32 to an esp8266 (it was very much overkill to have the esp32 handle 14-21 led’s :laughing:

I got the last one converted, so now I have three candleholders with LED’s, all with proper led plugs on them, so I can easily mount them together or have them placed seperately with their own controller.
I also changed the way I did the ‘powerbus’ so that I run one set of wires through the two ‘legs’ and then just solder the powerwires from the ‘candles’ to it, that gave quite a bit of space in the groove, so I could change the cables to a better type (silicone isolated 20awg) and with color coding so I didn’t need the silverpen :slight_smile:
Oh, yes one final thing, soldering the wires so they arch inwards was very cumbersome, but it gave a better result with space management in the small bulb holder.

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