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42
kiki
3y

Christmas lights were blinking randomly IN SECTIONS without any sort of "control brick", just with a plain wall plug and TWO wires coming out of it.

In this house we obey the laws of physics, I immediately called magic on this and started digging. I found out that was like five chains of lights wired in parallel, and every chain contained one special lamp that had a thin plate of some thermal-sensitive material inside. It heats up which makes it go straight, thus breaking its chain until it cools down enough to curl again and make the contacts touch.

Brilliant and really cheap way of making randomly blinking Christmas lights without any kind of controller, with just two wires and some physics. That's what I call "nocode".

random

magic

nocode
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Comments
  • 4
    3y
    @OmerFlame
  • 6
    3y
    That’s actually really cool!

    Also @kiki why did you mention me lol
  • 6
    3y
    @Haxk20 Using ICs means requring low voltage. Those Christmas lights are usually have a lots of lights in series, so it can be directly plugged into 230V.
  • 2
    3y
    @Haxk20 And you need a casing, a rectifier, likely some capacitors and resistors... Only a few things, but they sum up.
  • 2
    3y
    Nice, cheap way of making annoyingly distracting lights
  • 5
    3y
    That's interesting, I wonder how long that part will last though with the constant bending and temperature shifts
  • 2
    3y
    Am I the only person that played around with bimetall bulbs. They were funny as they did not start blinking immediately. People thought that they broke it after picking it up, good prank for a 7 year old.
  • 4
    3y
    We had these fucking things in our school Christmas trees some years ago.
    Everyone thought they were fucking broken until we figured it out.
    Thanks to Marek for literally incinerating the instructions.
  • 3
    3y
    Yes it is cool. They have been using this "magic" for 40 or more years (prob longer). We had this when I was a kid. The ICs we have now didn't exist back then.
  • 4
    3y
    Bimetal strips where used for all sorts of low-frequency switching applications before transistors became mainstream.
    Bimetal coils are still used in non-electric mercury-free thermometers.
  • 1
    3y
    This looks like someone misinterpreted how 'randomly' the lights should blink:
    "IC? No, that's deterministic, they said they wanted 'random'..."
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