Introduction: LED TREE

Picture of LED TREE

Do you have some spare LED's lying around? Do you have some spare time and are you looking for something to do? Why not make an LED TREE. Its fun as long as you follow the steps and use a clean Soldering iron. The result is an amazing piece of art that you can look at for hours.

Step 1: Materials

Picture of Materials

You Need:
1) Soldering Equipment
2) I think it was 13 LED's (you choose how many you want. they should also be brand new so that they have long leads)
3) if you use 13 LED's you also need a 3.9 ohm resistor
4) AA battery case
5) thick wire (strong enough to hold up your bunch of LED's. Must be a conductor)
6) If you want Hot Glue to hold the wires in place
7) Blu tack to assist with soldering

Step 2: Fidgety Job of Soldering LED's Together

Picture of Fidgety Job of Soldering LED's Together

Since you want the all LED's in parallel you have to solder all the cathodes and anodes together. first solder a cross of four LED's together then add two on each side to. the rest of the LED's have to be soldered on at an angle. Since new LED's have different length cathode and anode the LED's can easily be attached at an angle. During this process use a 9V battery (with a resistor of course) after every LED added to test wether you got the polarity right. otherwise if you finish and it doesn't work it will be alot harder to fix the mistake. Also keep checking your soldering for bridges. I advise you to clean your soldering iron thoroughly before you start or this process will cause you alot of pain. It took me alot longer to get it done than i thought. At least this will improve your soldering.

Step 3: Soldering LED Bunch to Battery Case

Picture of Soldering LED Bunch to Battery Case

Solder the 3.9 ohm resistor to one of the battery case tabs. solder two thick wires to that resistor and the other tab. Cut both wires at the same distance from the battery case and solder the LED bunch to those two wires ( so that the whole LED bunch is forward biased). then insert some batteries into the battery pack and stare at your wonder!

Step 4: Further Development

Picture of Further Development

You could make the LED bunch somewhat bigger. There is one problem though, its hard enough to solder 13 LED's together. You might be asking yourself why this idiot didn't put in a switch, well...... I couldn't be bothered. but of course you can if you want. You might also be wondering why i didnt use a 9V battery well....... the 9V battery couldn't keep the LED TREE standing up, and of course i dont like 9V batteries because they cost more.

As you might have notice the other photos are my SOLAR NIGHT LIGHTS. They are made by buying a cheap solar garden light and taking it apart so I can put the circuit in a better case. The other star light is the solar night light where i stuck the whole solar garden light on the window. The reason why I'm telling you this is because you can make a solar night light with an LED tree.

I hope you enjoyed this project!


vishalapr (author)2011-06-13

Very neatly wrapped up 5* really nice, will subscribe to you, maybe you would like to have a look at my ibles as well
Thanks in advance

derbert (author)2009-08-04

awesome. tried it, and it's surprisingly satisfying to look at in the dark. but soldering them took ages...

eliaugust54 (author)2009-07-05

i have a 2.2k ohm resistor and i just wanted to know if that was okay to sub 3.9 for a 2.2k ohm.

eliaugust54 (author)eliaugust542009-07-05

...or a 9volt battery clip instead of a AA battery case

blue is cool (author)2009-05-16

Awesome! I think I'll try it! I like this because it's not too expensive, but still cool. Maybe you convert it with the 'Programmable LED'-

woodswalker (author)2009-01-05

Cool looking project! I think you need to add a few more steps. "you have to solder all the cathodes and anodes together", but I think you should show a few pics of how this is supposed to look. Also are you using any sort of core to attach the LED's to, or are they just kind of hanging onto each other?

imarzouka (author)2008-03-22

Here is a good LED calculator that I use to find the resistor values i need for my LEDs

killerjackalope (author)2007-12-28

Maybe you should creat a trunk of five leds attached together or six and branch outward from the top of that with the others meeting in the middle, If you need a resistor you could shape your circuit to put it in the middle.

Bobbish (author)2006-04-20

Interesting, good use of LED's, how long does it last per battery?

puffin_juice (author)Bobbish2006-12-06

dont know, you'll have to calculate that, measure the current flow in the circuit and divide the batteries "Ahr or mAhr(first divide by 1000)" by that number and that is the answer to your question in hours. hope that helps

Crash2108 (author)2006-08-29

I was thinking more of that..
I would love to see an instructable of that.

puffin_juice (author)Crash21082006-12-06

That was where I got my idea from but I cant afford that many LEDs plus I wreckon its a little over the top

bignothing (author)2006-08-07

If I used a 9v battery instead of the AA's would I still use the same value resistor?

puffin_juice (author)bignothing2006-12-06

No you have a higher voltage drop across the circuit, therefore we have to increase the resistor value so that a larger proprotion of the voltage drop is across the resistor and the LED's still have the same voltage across them. This can be calculated by working out the required current and using ohms law V=IR to calculate R

puffin_juice (author)2006-04-19

Yeah that might be cool. you should post it as a project once you've finished so i can have a look at it.

andy (author)2006-04-19

cool idea, why not combine it with the blue bawls bottle auto light circut?
so you have a funky night light thing, i might give it a go myself...

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