An attractive display to enhance your Christmas decorations or your child’s ceiling.

Behind this design was an idea to make an interesting ceiling display for a child’s bedroom. One of the author’s colleagues had seen a display of blue lights in a shopping centre and wanted to know if the author could duplicate this.

The lights needed to be slowly increasing and decreasing in brightness and behaving in a random fashion. Thereby was perceived a means by which the author could lull his own insomniac toddler to sleep, and so set to work immediately!

Basing the system on a PIC microcontroller, it was found that the results were so pleasing that it was thought to be of interest to EPE readers – but absolutely no guarantee about the sleep remedy! The original idea has been expanded to create a number of different effects, so that apart from the slow and soothing bedroom display, quite a number of other display options are possible.