Brighten up your garden's night-time color scheme

This design originated both from the annoyance of frequently changing conventional small lamps in a garden lighting set, the addition of a small water feature and the subsequent desire to “do something different”.

Using the latest developments in l.e.d. technology seemed the obvious answer. Replacing lamps with l.e.d.s brings optical problems. Inevitably, decorative lighting is required to emit light in all directions, and this would either require a cluster of l.e.d.s, or a reflector, mirror, diffuser arrangement.

Thoughts along these lines then provoked the question “what colour?”, and so the perhaps less obvious answer of “all colours”. Since all colours can be derived from a mix of red, blue, and green, it should be possible to add life to a static display by varying the colour of emitted light.

In practice, mixing colours to get a single, varying colour light is near impossible without specialist optics. However, the display remains interesting and different with various mixes of colours being visible.

All of this leaves the original problem of optics. The project described here gets around this by using a reversing light housing available from Halfords – complete with mirror and diffusing lens.

The controller described here is simple, and can be easily adapted for small incandescent lamps, or a chain of l.e.d.s – indeed, there is no reason why one controller could not be adapted by adding some buffer gates and extra transistor stages to run a large number of displays.

After watching the prototype for a while, the author came to feel that this is the electronic equivalent of the Lava Lamp!