Designing better electric lanterns

If you have ever hanged electric lanterns you know the pain. A string of lanterns comes in a predetermined length and predetermined spacing for each lantern.
This post will talk about how to make a custom set of lanterns to take lantern hanging to the next level.

The Problem with off the shelf lantern lights:

• boring - a lot of them are just one color and always on.
• single bulb for each lantern, which create bright spots
• hard to sync the segments in a daisy chain
• not customizable - can't control the how spacing of the lanterns.

Oh here's a picture for visualization:

Technologies that can make lanterns better

• WLED - open source software for controller LEDs.
• afford LEDs
• cheap Chinese Electrical connectors.
• affordable wifi enabled chips

Tackling the first and second issues:

For those always on single bright bulb, the solution is easy. LEDs!! LEDs come in many different flavors brightness. To avoid bright spots we want to choose a flavor where the diodes are close enough together such that they blend together with no discernible bright spots... Also as you know, lanterns are round and are viewed from all sides, so the LEDs must emit light in all directions. Here is the solution. Take an LED segment and twist it.

Solving problem three.

Trouble with syncing the lights? This is where WLED comes in. If each segment of lanterns is control by a single controller, WLED can magically sync the segments for us. One controller can act as a master controller and all other controller slaves...

And finally... Challenge number four.

Controller Spacing. If this T butt connectors is used, you can just run power and snap your lanterns at any position.

The finish product:

This picture looks unimpressive, but this is a platform that can be scaled out. More lanterns, much impressive.