Arduino Uno to switch between strands of LED Christmas lights for Halloween Proj

Using Arduino Project Guidance
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Greetings, I'm new to arduino / electronics and I'm looking to see if what I'm wanting to do is feasible.

We have a haunted house that we're building and we are in need of some "cannons" for our life size pirate ship. we have 4 cannons each connected to it's own fogger which will be blowing smoke out of the tube its connected to. We have 4 strands of christmas lights (one for each cannon) that we're going to drill holes into the tube and put the LED lights into so when the cannon goes off it will turn on the lights and make it look like the cannon was fired.

My plan is to:

Use and arduino to trigger the manual fogger button on the remote control

when this button is "pressed" it the arduino will also send a signal to turn on the lights hidden inside the "cannon".

After being able to do that I'd like to expand of this and have the arduino pick a random cannon to do this process to.

I have found some examples of triggering the fogger from here: horrorseek.com - This website is for sale! - horrorseek Resources and Information.

but now I need to figure out how to control the 4 strands of LEDs.

Is this doable? Would relays work for this?

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Is this doable? Would relays work for this?

Hi,
yes, relays would be good for this because their contacts are isolated from arduino and you don't need to worry about what "ground" is on the foggers.

an example is here: http://arduino-direct.com/sunshop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=155

You would use the COM and NO (normally open) contacts to connect across the fogger switch.

DISCLAIMER: Mentioned stuff from my own shop...

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Thanks Terry.. would I need another of of these to control the 4 strands of LED lights too?

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Those and similar relays come on boards with 1,2,4,8 relays, so you can mix for any number, if you count in Binary :slight_smile:

See: http://goo.gl/8ZEQ8

Also see some How-To here: http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/ArduinoPower