Rebuilding some fairy lights

My daughter has these fairy light that stopped working. A few of the globes have blown and I couldn't get replacements. So here goes making the new setup so we can have the animals still as she has a sentimental attachment to them.

I ordered a pack of LED's and a matching controller from AliExpress. I purchased the SK6812 as they have RGBW pixels in each LED so we can have just the white LED's on to emulate the original string. I've made a power cable for it so they can plug in to any USB outlet for ease of use. Usually we use esp8266 wifi boards to control LED strips and pixels though this is for use at her mum's house so I made it simple to setup and use.

Next came the rather big task of preping and soldering all the cables. There are only 20x pixels in the string but each one has 6x connections (except the last one) power in, data in, and ground then power out, data out, and ground. It took a while but I got there :) I made a template to get all of the cables 150mm long then around about 10mm of the outer insulation removed and 5mm of the insulation on the wires removed. I then tinned and soldered them all together.

This is one of the animals with the parts I 3D printed. The idea is to reuse the animals which will clamp between the grey LED mount and the bulb defuser.

Here's the LED and cabling glued and clipped in to place. I made it so the base would allow the cable to be clipped in to place.

The top is then glued in with the LED adjusted to ensure it's right in the centre of the cut out. Ignore the crappy quality of the top part. I didn't have much luck with the 3D printer doing a batch.

Here are all the parts put together. The globes just fit tightly in to place so we don't need to use glue on them and we can remove the animals easily for reuse if my daughter wants to do something else with them.

And from the underside.

Lights On!

Aqua in the dark

The finished string in rainbow mode

The finished string with white selected. My daughter was very happy to have them was looking forward to getting them up in her room at her mum's. To me that's a successful job!