Project Summary

I'll be the first to point out that this project was ridiculous. I live with three girls and they like decorating our house like an asylum (they're fun). When one of them suggested this project I thought it would be a fun warm up for my Arduino Garden project, and since I already owned everything I needed I figured I'd jump into it.

Wiring

The wiring for this was super straight forward. I didn't use any current limiting resistors for this because the batteries internal resistance should be enough to limit the current for such a simple project. I used a 6V 4xAA battery pack, with two parallel series of three LEDs with approximately 2V forward voltages. This configuration sees the 6V drop evenly across the three LEDs in series in both parallel lines.

Results

Here's the final product on while we we're watching a movie on our projector. They light up just fine at night. We've had this on night after night and so far I've only been through one set of batteries. None of the LEDs have burned out yet either so banking on the internal resistance of the batteries has worked out so far too.

Going forward I think I'm going to rewire these to an adapter, add a resistor to regulate the current, and maybe add some sort of photoresistor switch so they turn on and off based on ambient light. When I get around to this I'll update this page.