Do you know Christmas lights?

Christmas lanterns are a major part of the holiday season. With the advent of November and December, you may find strings of colorful lights everywhere-Christmas trees, houses, shrubs, low trees, and even passing cars are covered with lights!

Dating back 30 or 40 years ago, looking back at how people used lights to decorate houses and trees, you will find that most people used small 120-volt incandescent bulbs. Each bulb is a 5 or 10 watt bulb, just like the lights you see at night. You can still find these light strings, but they are not so common anymore. There are three main reasons for this:

They consume a lot of electricity. If you have a string of 50 5-watt bulbs, this string of lights consumes 250 watts! Most people use two to three strings of lights to decorate trees and 10 strings of light bulbs to decorate their houses, so you can imagine how much electricity it consumes!

So the whole string of lights will not flicker. Obviously, these bulbs have no shunt (if there are, the remaining bulbs will not flicker), so when the flash bulb goes out, the remaining bulbs will go out accordingly, unless you replace the flash bulbs.

More complicated bulbs have 16-function controllers, and you can control the bulbs in various interesting patterns. In these systems, you will usually find a control box that drives four independent mini light strings. The four light strings are connected in a staggered manner, not one after another. If you disassemble the control box, you will find that its structure is very simple. It contains an integrated circuit, four transistors or triacs-one switch drives a string of lights. The integrated circuit only needs to turn on the triac to light up one of the light strings. By properly ordering the triacs, a variety of lighting effects can be designed!