I made some LED lights to go down the side of the stairs in the house I share, so we can go up and down the stairs at night without putting on the main light, and also to cheer the place up a bit. This is a write-up of that project.

The bit I'm most pleased with is the switching circuit. I had finished soldering the LEDs in parallel into 2 core mains flex before I decided we should have a switch at both ends. So I had to find a way to send the switch signal down the same pair of wires as the power for the LEDs. The answer was to design the switch so it shorted the supply briefly through a capacitor. The resulting current pulse is picked up by a circuit on the control unit, where it toggles the LEDs from off to on and back. A nice thing about this design is you could have as many switches as you want - e.g. one on every floor of a long staircase.

At the moment, there's just a few pictures. I am hoping to put up some more details and maybe an instructables article later.

Starting to splice an LED and resistor into the cable:

Soldering the spliced LED:

Putting heatshrink on the spliced LED:

Showing off the light cable after I'd finished it:

Finished lights, from bottom:

Finished lights, looking up the stairs:

Finished lights, looking down the stairs: