Could LED xmas lights be made to look like the old Incan Flasher Bulbs?

With a custom flasher chip that could be built into each LED for a pretty low cost, and a plastic light waveguide inside the bulb to make it look like a filament. It wouldn't cost much in the large quantities it would sell, so I don't know why it's not available.

Already for sale: More: Schematics:

What I want are squirrel proof Christmas (Hannukah) lights. Every year, I have to resolder the wires thanks to the squirrels.

There are "simulated incandescent filament" lights that are really LED's in disguise:

I couldn't find one that's the same size as a Hanukkah, err... Christams tree light, but some are close if one downsizes the LED's.

Anything can be done if you throw enough hardware at it. In this case, LED Christmas lights are series strung, so if one goes out a lot of lights go with it. This isn't uncommon in incandescent strings, either. The mini-lights are usually the same. You could blink 50 (give or take) adjacent lights at once with the common strings fairly easily. To blink one at a time, I guess you could either drive the string with a current source and short the "off" LEDs, rather than opening the circuit or substitute a resistor for the "off" LEDs. Either are possible but not trivial.

Simply a matter of more hardware/software. The switch (from above) can PWM (pulse-width-modulate) the LED in an on-off-on-off pattern to mimic the incandescent lamp. Again, it's "just" hardware/software.

Not "difficult" but not $6 (retail) for 150 LED strings, either. I'd guess 100x that much $$, but I don't know how they do it for $6 either.

You could use 4 microchip PIC microprossors (16F628) to control 15 lights each for a string of 45 lights. The processors are cheap at $1.80 each and can supply 10 milliamps to each LED. But it requires a software program to randomly flash the LEDs or do whatever desired patterns. It also requires a lot of wiring for each LED to the processors. I have a 50 Xmas light star display that runs on a PC desktop running QBasic DOS 6.2. It uses a separate PC power supply for the 5 volts to power the lights. It does all sorts of patterns and sequences the lights right, left, random, and so forth. I spent a couple months figuring out the patterns I wanted.

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ISTR years ago seeing self flashing LEDs for 5v or 12v. Lots in parallel would be close, but no fade.

NT

You need to get rid of the lead free squirrels. ;-)