Watching you solder to the PIC in your hand made me realize how incredible human hands are.

Clive, that is precisely why people like me watch your channel. It's the fact that you're quite at ease and in a happy place when you do projects like this. When the video producer is comfortable in what they are doing, it makes for excellent content. The fact that you have a glorious accent and are really funny is icing on the cake. You're digit dexterity is second to none. Even my wife is amazed to see how your fingers move. I find myself practicing holding three or four things at once in alignment. I suck.

Lol i found myself blowing the screen when you are soldering to blow the smoke away 😄

Anyone else think that Clive could be the Bob Ross of electronic DIY?

I like these videos about the miniature PIC processors.. Shame that there aren't more.

If you solder everything above the shoulders on the pins and on the top side of the chip you can leave the small pins to reprogram it later if you decide to upgrade the software. As you suggested, the logic could be improved to detect a bridged SW1 input and maybe cycle through the various effects every so often. You could also fashion a makeshift momentary/latching combo switch with the long lead from R1 and a discarded LED lead. The shape would be similar to the pin on the back of a promotional pin/button with a straight bit that hooks behind a hooked bit. Now you can press it down momentarily on the back of the hook to cycle once, or if you want it to loop (once the logic is upgraded) you can hook it behind and it will stay shorted. I'm enjoying all your videos, you are inspiring me to get back into electronics. Thank you.

"If I can do it, you can do it" he says, whilst holding the thing between his pinky and middle finger...

Instead of just skipping the soldering or other "boring" parts, what about leaving them in the videos but played faster, like some timelapse footage of your soldering. Would be really awesome. And ofc neat project

I actually made one of these today, and it's really great. Thanks Clive! I loved making it. I made it because I want to learn to program PIC microcontrollers (thanks to this video), so this project seemed a good start. Flashing the PIC12 was not as easy, because I bought a PicKit3 from China, which probably is not the real deal, and it's output voltage is just not 5 volts. After fixing that, I started soldering. My enameled copper wire was not as good as Clive's, because sometimes I had to clean the soldering iron 3 or 4 times and apply new solder before the tin started attaching to the copper. I mounted a battery pack containing three 1,5v cells and used a 68 ohm resistor instead of 100. Yes, it really looks nice. Now it's time to alter the program. :)

Very nice Clive. I dig your soldering style as well... Not very often I see someone doing deadbug using the same technique I do. I'm friggin glued to your channel man. Awesome stuff.

Just watched this video and I now realise that I had a very jolly but unseasonal rendition of Sleigh Ride going on in my mind for the entire 35 minutes of it. With energetic strings, in F(!). You and your videos are truly inspirational, and thank you for another good one. Rich.

The meteor lights would make a cool necklace. =)

"If I can do it, you can do it", says Clive. Uh, right. 😳😆. I have to admit this was the trickiest bit of soldering I've seen you do on your channel, but it was fun and educational.

Perhaps an addition to the pic program could be a long button press that makes it cycle through all modes with a 15 -20 sec delay? Love the power up, remember last program function. The self test is brilliant. Going to make a tree full of these. Cheers.

Any chance you would release the uncompiled source code? Or perhaps it release it for Patreon supporters?

i love these DIY builds you do. i learn a-lot and there inspiring. cheers Clive. keep up the good work.

Don't linger with your finger while you tin the pin.

You should never admit that you peeked at your pic-it. I think I will try leaving the 'switch' lead just a bit longer so that when it's snipped and 'formed', they can be pushed together by squeezing whatever covers them. Like the 'button cell LED key' thingys. Might have to put dab of glue at the solder corners to keep the pins on the chip from flexing. I think this will be my first PIC project.

Don’t linger with your finger, When you tin a pin. -Big Clive

With the enamel wire I use a nail file to take it off then tin and go from there, if it interested.

can you please upload the code instead of the hex file? i want to use it for my bike.. hence i need to remove few effects from the program.

Is there a reason you don't use a more efficient wiring pattern like below? Or would it not really make the project any easier? AD AD (reverse polarity) AC AC (reverse) AB AB (reverse) DB DB (reverse) CB CB (reverse) CD CD (reverse) This way all the A connections are in sequence, all the B connections are in sequence, and most of the C connections are in sequence.

Very pleasing display clive :-D One of those tiny clicky switches from an old car radio or vcr could be glued to the chip, easy switch :-D For me, i would have a turned pin socket for the pic, less chance of killing the chip with heat. kynar wire is handy stuff too :-D

How about a video showing the workshop?

It is indeed strange how the mind reacts to certain things. As I watch this, it take me back to Vietnam 1971 watching the fight for the Hi-van Pass north of Danang. We were stationed at Camp Haskins, between Danang and the pass, and at night we could and often did watch as the VC and NVA fired down from the mountain at the US troops, you see the Communist forces used a green tracer every 10th or 5th round, while the free forces used red tracers at the same spacing. So it was, we could watch the heavy machine guns firing away, and tracers keep burning after they impact, and as they glance off the ground or rock, they seemed to tumble off into space before burning out. So it came to mind that a fellow could build these out of sets of red and green LEDs to simulate the battle for the Hi-van pass. Would make an amazing display for my picture window on the 4th of July, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. I shall have to attempt to build some of these for just that purpose. Who knows if I get to go South again this year, which is becoming doubtful but I still have hopes, I could put them in the windshield of my motor home and have the battle displayed for my Arizona friends, and fellow vets who remember the war.

Nice. Multiplexting with the LED polarity is one of those things that makes you go "why didnt I think of that". If it works as well with transistors I can use that in my speccy keyboard translator (+2A to +2 matrix converter)

How you manage to solder that resistor to the chip without burning the crap out of your fingers is Nothing short of incredible, You make it look so easy and it’s anything but..... Great little project but I know I would melt my fingers and then just have a meltdown in general.

One of the first times i tried shaking solder of my soldering iron, the solder landed on my hand. The scar is around 1.5 Cm2

I don't know why, but I could watch you solder for hours.

Hi Clive, I love your videos. Has got me back into electronics. I'm learning to program pic micorcontrollers at the moment. For this set up, did you use the third (high impedance) state of the outputs so as not to get more than one LED on at a time? I've been programming it with Flowcode as I do not know C etc and it makes some of the other LEDs light up because of the way they're wired. The only way I've found that works in Flowcode is to use make the outputs neither high or low each time you switch to another step in the display (think it's call tri state) and that means temporarily classing the pin as an input until you next need it to be high or low. That sound similar to how you did it?

Would be nice to show us how to properly make an remote 2ch box light switch or gate opener.

For those wanting to use an Arduino instead of a PIC, Google Arduino attiny85 charlieplexing - Instructables

And for those that want to learn the terminology, driving the LEDs in this method is called charlieplexing (because it was proposed in 1995 by Charlie Allen at Maxim Integrated). Even though is was patented in 1979 as a "three-state signaling system".

I'll call it the BEST CHARLIEPLEXING tutorial video :')

I remember falling afoul of the Read-Modify-Write problem of the small PICs back when I started with them years ago (I started with the poorly specced PIC16F84A - the only one Maplin had in stock in my local store (a few miles away from where your nice Grapefruit Gin's made, Hereford, where they have about 10 components in stock at any one time). It's so much easier on the newer PICs with a LATx register. However, it's simple enough to keep your own internally buffered GPIO register copy which you modify then write out en-masse.

You and Mike of Mike's electric stuff are in a very similar business have you ever met or worked together?

with the flexibility and control of your fingers you could have become a pretty good slight-of-hand magician.

I find myself very fascinated and enjoy these videos. no matter the product

Thanks Clive you have inspired me to build these and learn new skillls and understanding. Picked over Julian Ilett's work on PIC controllers to help the learning. Keep it up.

My PIC12F629 chips arrived today - just in time for Christmas :-)

If you ever consider selling these in this modified form, I would buy a TON of them! What you did is way beyond my capabilities

Regarding the iPad, if it has a flat back there is a tiny 2x telephoto lens that attaches to a little magnetic ring, which in turn sticks to the back of the iPad. I know I would be fine with half a second of wobbly image as you attach the lens. A quick search will find it. I've seen a 4x telelphoto lens too, I'm sure there will be reviews on here somewhere.

I also thought about adding led's except i wondered how many sets of 12 that one pic could run in parallel

Don't linger with the finger; I'm a poet and I know it. Nice video Clive. Regards Bob

Nice one Clive, love the fact you only use 1 resistor, I'll have to make some but use the 5 outputs and 2 resistors (reset input switch) . The way you have the LED's wired you could use one every hour or so to measure the light level and only turn on at night. I love the 12F675 so can use the ADC or use the RC use tight loop

You could use the LED pins, and bend them to join adjacent pins of the same output where available? It would reduce the number of connections for the insulated wire. Example - the top 3 A pins all together, use the LED pins to join the 3 into one, and then connect the wire.

One slightly sneaky point I missed when I watched the video is that there's multiple routes for the current through the LEDs: For A-C, it can go A-B B-C as well as A-C. The only reason the A-B and B-C LEDs don't light is because the A-C LED effectively shorts them out. I realised this when I built a partial breadboard with the LEDs and drove it from an arduino. I was slightly mystified why multiple LEDs lit up even though I was only driving pairs of LEDs.

Very cool! In fact, brilliant. You've got the force when you solder, I have toasted several/many ic's by directly soldering onto the legs. I dub thee Obi-Wan Kenobi of the electrons.

This is a very interesting project, and I see the suggested video for the ropelight construction, so I'll be watching that next.

Thanks Clive for great video's and informative fun! You have inspired me to get back into electronics after recently watching almost ALL of your videos in a week after a operation on my sholder. These meteor lights are great and easy to build and l'm sure everyone who has made them appreciate your excellent design in the hex file (you did all the hard work..) I also loved that scripting led sign and just had to make one like it for work. Ill buy you a beer if ever I get over your way. Cheers, Greg (Australia)

Now you should try making RGB meteor lights! What will help is if you use those digital LEDs, the ones with a control chip inside. They have power pins, a DIN (data in), and a DOUT (data out) pin. They basically work like shift registers. That would greatly simplify the wiring, but of course they cost a little more (not a huge amount more though).

Big Clive should invent something and use crowd funding to fund the manufacturing since your designs are safer than designs in most china products

Ah, good old charlieplexing. I did a 7x8 LED display with that in high school. While I did not utilize the full amount of pins on the µC I used and my code was terrible. It ran decently fast even with terribly done interrupts for a i2c bus. I got a video of it on my channel if anyone is interested. The PCB I made is also pretty terrible, but overall. I am impressed what you can do with these µCs. I had no experience with C programming when I started doing it, and with just some tutorials off of google and a bit of thinking you can go a long way.

You've convinced me to try electronics again, this is a really good vid! good work!

Aha! the old pencil trick. A guy at school in the '60s got a fancy new motorbike way beyond the means of most lads, and was keen on bragging how great it was. So we ran a line of soft lead pencil down his plugs creating short circuit for the HT to track, and sat back to watch him try to start it. Finally we could wait bear it no longer and I 'had a look' for him while with twisting motion wiped the plugs clean and to great hilarity told him his plugs were loose - started first time. Did same again later in the day and he even went to the dealers to complain - but the bragging stopped. ..happy days

You could still have multiple LEDs on at once, there are just some combinations that don't work. For example, you could have A high and B, C and D low to make those 3 on at once. You could also try a chase arrangement where 2 LEDs are lit and it cycles through them all, where for example you start with A high and B low. Then put C low. Then B high Z and D low Then C high Then A high Z and B high Then C low Then D High Z and A low Then C high Then B high Z and D high Then C low Then A high Z and B low Then C high Then D high Z and A high. And repeat. If the controller also supports PWM output or a fast enough and reliable clock speed you could even have the LEDs fade in and out.

...or there will be porky smell and smoke. Oh, lol. I'm currently thinking about making a bigclive sound board. Yes, I think I'll be doing that when I come home next week.

I did a Light setup for paramedic truck with I think 402 size smd leds just by hand an a total of 60 leds on the front and 40 on the back using 2 556 chips to organize timing and it took me 3 days of looking through a 600x zoom desk lamp I will only ever do it again with a smd board and the oven.

I would love to see one in a RGB circuit. I can apply that to my Christmas sweaters and holiday sweaters. Just saying I made a Santa Claus hat with the basic LEDs using oscillating. I love to learn

You could make a mold, build the project, test it and when everything works, you could pour clear quickset epoxy or resin into the mold and encase it. That would be so cool!

Looking at this video at 130 am and cant stop watchin

I would suggest "J" hooking the LED leads onto the wire to make a more secure connection especially if your going to be stuffing them into a tube, less risk of breaking a solder joint.

I made one with 5 wires/20 LEDs a while ago. It's on a standard perfboard, and the back is just a (somewhat logical looking) mess of wires.

I spent the whole night making a string of 20 LED and it would have been so much easier with this kind of enameled wire instead of cutting, stripping, twisting, tinning and soldering 40 bits of normal insulated wire (also I could have used one resistor in series instead of one on each LED). Still had a lot of fun though.

it would look nice dropped into one of those frosted glass vodka bottles :)

I think if I were going to build one of these I'd use HC595s.. makes the software much simpler and you can infinitely extend the string with more HC595s!

Nice light Clive!

Using a pencil to bridge the conductors has just reminded me... anybody here remember the trick with the old AMD CPU’s to unlock the multipliers? xD

Wow , great project. Thanks BC , the effects are great. i just built it with a dip 8 holder and a micro momentary Sw on the back. I had a small problem!!!! I found that it started in the middle ran to the bottom, back to the top and down to middle again. (Perhaps because im down under in the southern hemisphere?) If you look at the way it works all the tri state options are in the first 6 leds (AB to CD) then it repeats again but inversed, (BA to CD) the polarity is changed for the last 6. My board now starts at BA and finishes at CD and works perfectly now starting at top and finishing at the bottom. Good fun figuring it out. Thanks again big Clive, love your work, at play.

Very nice effects! I am always happy when I can get my bigclive fix.

I was a bit surprised to see that the resistor also drops the controller's supply voltage, but the PIC seems to work down to 2.0V, so it figures it's not an actual problem. A red or yellow LED might be a bit borderline though...

I guess i could theoretically extend it to 24 or 36 by repeating the pattern once right? Of course including that the light pattern would also repeat. And i just try to figure out if i could use this with RGB LEDs by shifting the wires 1 pin for each LED and get some funky color changing results. I love funky stuff.

You said you were looking at other options for filming - could you just use a stationary magnifying glass on a stand and place it under the ipad camera? You know, those ones that people use for model making and such.

Great little project Clive, Many thanks

The sixth pin is used on the PIC32MX chips. And probably on others. I absolutely love the PIC32 chips. The only thing I find disappointing is that the PICKIT 3 doesn't have JTAG, though it does do debugging, it's pretty slow at it. However, having debugging on the base unit is a BIG step above Atmel's line.

Also - idea - have the first pattern after power on send the Ascii binary for Big Clive down the tube. Just because.

You should add a binary counter effect

yippeee got right pic and made a set that worked first time cheers clive

Great project , even for us novices. Would love to apply this to some decking type lights with a motion sensor down my path to guide visitors in, and scare the bejesus out of the cat.

Might be nice to use a compact little NO reed switch in place of the bridging wire, that way you can properly seal it all up, and can still activate it and change modes with a magnet

Your voice is so soothing and the info is cool to pick up on... You should make an ASMR video sometime.

About the IPad zoom issue, have you looked into the zoom lenses on ebay? That could be a find.. Another alternative for pretty decent macro image, is to somehow stick or hold the lens from a disposable camera to the camera on the IPad, I've tried it before and you do get some alright images, but you are still required to move the IPad closer with that.

One idea that I had was a way to save that extra I/O pin. With tri-state multiplexing, the third state is as a high-impedence input. Could you use that as the state-setting input - use surrounding LEDs to pull the pin high, but short it low via a button - or vice versa, depending on where the threshold voltages are.

Have you thought about chaining multiple of these? I know the software would get a lot more complicated for many effects (especially those where only the first/last LED in the string should do something special) and might not even fit in the memory anymore, but longer strings would be nice maybe.

Thanks to Clive we should expect to evolve a 3rd hand any day now

No mention of those helping-hand things with the arrangable aligator clips? That's the way to save yourself from burnt fingers if you lack the dexterity for some of the fiddly stuff.

Great video. I wasn't 'a member' of your channel back then yet and somehow skipped it during browsing older vids :(

That's great Clive. Thank you very much

From a code standpoint it seems like a better ordering would be AB AC AD BC BD BA CD CA CB DA DB DC as that lets you do them in order using simple modulo arithmetic. That is also easy to generalize to any number of pins. Probably doesn’t do the wiring any favors though. :)

Never seen anyone else solder the way you do i will have to give it a try have you got especially big hands? ..i stick what i'm working on down with blutack or use a third hand..cheers for the videos love the humour.

What bench power supply is it? I've only ever had one, which is a typical 30V 3A programmable single channel but it'd be nice to get 3 or more channel one with a nice 5A or 10A output per channel. I know Dave EEVBlog has some really nice top of the range power supplies which are sent to him. But like he's said in the past, no matter how much new bits of gear has been sent to him. It doesn't put food on the table.

I suddenly realised that every time you were soldering and the smoke was coming up towards the camera, I found I was holding my breath.

This is an amazing project. It's going to be the next thing I tackle after the ioniser (which I've completed and need to figure out how to contain it, cause I used 50 caps for it, it's long)

Im going to give this a go! Properly interesting series 👍🏻 Love your videos! Top work :)

Hi BigClive, Finished my first DIY meteor light today. Amazingly it works - thanks for the video and code. I think it is cycling between displays - i don't know if that was intended or I have got some conductive crap on the wire switch. i bought the enamelled wire off eBay and no way will the soldering iron burn off the coating . I ended up using some coloured craft wire with a coating that smells like fish when you burn it off and is not a complete insulator more a high resistance. This leads to some interesting effects but properly spaced works fine. i will have to locate some different enamelled wire if I want to make a run of these for Christmas. But again thanks for the work you put into this. Regards Alan

your manual dexterity i way beyond mine

superb. got me thinking about multiplexing. can you show how an LCD display is able to control the millions of pixels? even with row/column addressing this seems like an impossible (though clearly not) challenge

Loved it Clive.

Cool project Clive, thank you and props on the coding. It's a shame you lost designs and other IP to 'piracy' over the years. Also I laughed as the Maplin PSU comment, amazing design feature.

Great stuff Clive.