Penta Colored LED Star

Hi this is my second Instructable and today i want to share how i build my Penta colored star which made a great decorative element for my Christmas tree. I myself thought of building something different for last Christmas and as a result mixed up five colors of LED and made this star.

Well this took some time because of the tricky soldering and setting the whole set up to a platform. Let's not waste any more time and get into step 1.

Apologies i missed to take photos of the bare platform i have used in this project. But seeing the above photo i believe you can get the idea, how to pick such shaped platforms. I got mine from a old dysfunctional decoration light. You can pick platform of any shape just to spice up the project. If you couldn’t find any you can make your own platform from a cardboard by cutting them in appropriate shape and size.

Now the next step is to pick your LED’s and choose the supply your are going to power up your light. I planned to use 4 LED’s for each wing of my star which makes a total of 20 LED’s for this whole project. I have chosen five colors Red,Yellow, Green, White and Blue. And i want my light to be really portable which i should be able to mount it on a wall or hang it from a ceiling. So i stick to 9v battery.

In similar way decide how you want to light up and this will give you the total number of LED’s you required. Based on that choose your power supply, be it portable battery or via adapter that’s up to you.

You can view the circuit diagram and explanation for this project in "DIY penta colored star".

With a 9V battery powering 20 LED's i could power each wing in a parallel connection. However it would suit for the wings with color Red, Green and Yellow since it has 2v forward drop. So each of these three wings has 4 LED's and 1 resistor for current limiting.

But in case of Blue and White LED's which has 3V voltage drop, they cannot be powered similar to the RGY wing. So for the Blue and White wings we power the LED's in such a way with it forms 3 LED's and 1 resistor pair each. Rest of the two (1 Blue and 1 White) LED's will form a different pair.

Now that our circuit is ready, all we got left is to set it on the platform. I have numbered the steps with respect to the photos above (starting from top) for better understanding.

1) Start with working on one wing at a time Solder two LED's together by cutting it's leads on appropriate sizes as shown in the above image.

2) Continuing soldering the third and fourth LED of that wing and finally it should look something like this. Place it on a wing and tape it to the platform or you can use any glue for this purpose, the choice it up to you.

3) Now repeat the same for rest of the wings (Yellow and Red).

4) For Blue and White wings only three LED's should be soldered together in a parallel connection. Solder the remaining 1 White and 1 Blue LED's together and set it in the above fashion.

Now we left with connecting the resistors and Ground points to each wings.

5) I have a perfboard board cut out in a circular shape for this purpose. Now solder appropriate resistor to each Anode ends of the first LED in a wing. Now Solder all the Cathode end of the terminating LED together which forms the ground point.

6) After done with all the soldering that circular piece will look like this. Refer the front and and back view of it. Use any adhesive to stick the circular perfboard to the star platform.

Now connect your power supply to the power and ground points. Now your DIY penta colored star light is ready.

Hope you like this instructable, do post your feedback of this project below many thanks :)