Thursday, February 23, 2012

Hey, Nice Balloons!

Okay, not those balloons.

In coordinating the decorations for a baby's first birthday party, my event planner wife bought some balloons to fill up the hall. However these balloons weren't regular ones, but rather contained LED lights in them. 

I stole one of them from the bag, pulled out the card to activate the LED, and blew it up. It actually gave off a fairly bright light for being in a balloon, though it naturally shone brighter in the dark than in the light of the dining room. 

A bag of 15 balloons goes for $10, or $0.67 each, and the bag says they last for 15 hours. After 48 hours, though, I got tired of waiting and popped the balloon to get at the LED to see what it was all about. 

It's not an LED spot, like so many we've built ourselves, but rather just a light. It's house in a small plastic housing that contains two small button batteries. I'm not electronically oriented enough to know all the ins and outs of how these LEDs work, but I didn't see any resistor anywhere unless it's somehow built into the bulb. 

But I wonder whether at the end of the party I'll be to scavenge all these balloons and take the LEDs (well, yes, I will), and then use them in my props? For example, I'll be building a Cauldron Creep at the next meeting of the NJ Hookerman M&T group and could perhaps use two of the bulbs for his eyes. The lights come in all different colors so there could be a multitude of uses for them in the right settings.

If anyone has used these before or has ideas on the best way to utilize them I'd love to hear them.






1 comment:

  1. These would be great if they came in single colors over a variety package. Pink Balloons at a Halloween party ain't cool..=)

    ReplyDelete

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