Make your own animated LED Christmas sign
Last year I made a simple LED Christmas sign with very basic animation effects controlled by a PIC MCU. One of my friends, who visited us during the last Christmas, liked it and asked me the recipe of the project so that he could make something similar to decorate his front porch during the next Christmas. In response I gave him the link on my blog where I have described the details of the project. As Christmas is just couple months away, I got an email from him two weeks ago, saying that he has just started working on the project. He followed everything in the recipe that I have described on my blog except the PIC programming part, which he has never done before. I told him that I can send him a programmed PIC processor but he didn’t seem happy with that. In his own words, ” I don’t want any black box in the project, I want to enjoy building every part of it”. Then I had to find an alternative way of running the LED Christmas sign without using a microcontroller. So, here I am revising my previous LED Christmas sign project by replacing the PIC16F688 microcontroller in the original circuit with digital logic ICs (74HC595 and 74HC14 ). I have also added flashing LEDs around the edges of the sign to make it look more attractive.
Christmas LED sign