One of the most ubiquitous decorations of Filipino Christmastide (i.e., the last one-third of the calendar year) is the parol, meant to symbolize the North Star the Magi followed to find the infant Jesus. My dad’s godparents gifted us one made of colored capiz (windowpane oyster) shells from the Philippines, probably upwards of twenty years ago now.
The problem
The original electronics had certainly aged: candelabra-base incandescent bulbs wired through a nest of stranded copper wire, tied to a controller at the base of the hook. By the time I last opened it in November 2025, virtually every bulb was burnt out, and I had no way to tell whether the controller even still worked. I could not for the life of me figure out how to measure the wattage that it could handle, and trying to find candelabra-base bulbs was already difficult as is.
The rebuild
Rather than risking blowing up the parol entirely or setting myself on fire, I decided to start from scratch. With some brainstorming help from ChatGPT, I designed a set of warm LED lights controlled by an Arduino Nano — in practice, the Elegoo Nano.
The microcontroller’s own output voltage wasn’t enough to drive multiple lights directly, so ChatGPT’s suggestion was to pair it with IRLZ44N MOSFETs to provide enough juice for the lights and just use the board as a switch. Between a few YouTube deep-dives and digging up everything I could recall from my Intro to Circuit Analysis class at community college, I designed the switching circuit myself and programmed the sequence in the Arduino IDE.
Holding the LED lights inside the parol is craft wire twisted around the wire cage. Similar to the original design, but unlike the tin roof on the Love Shack, not rusted (I swear I was born after 2000).
The result
Same star. Same shell. New lights. Serviceable, but by virtue of being LEDs, will ideally outlive my grandchildren.
Last steps
Modeling the controller chassis in FreeCAD to mount alongside the power supply and switch on a strip of DIN rail. Also, making some flashier sequences, maybe one to pair with music.