Ok, so I cut up a big strand of led christmas lights. there are 4 colors in the strand, red, yellow, green and blue. So I found this little thing called a SINGLE-PHASE GLASS PASSIVATED SILICON BRIDGE RECTIFIER that is placed before any of the leds. I did some research and found out that it converts ac power to dc and the dc power varies. I went and looked up the numbers on it and found some data sheets but I do not know what all the numbers and that mean. Can they tell me the voltage I should feed into them from an allready dc power source? here is one of the data sheets
http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet/bytes/RB153.pdf
Going by what I know on the rectifier,the rectifier allows a short circuit to happen without damage occuring while also converting AC to variable DC.
On the datasheet it says the range is 50 to 1000 volts at 1.5amperes,so the AC current is at least 50 volts.The rectifier turns a high voltage-low amperage current into a low voltage-high amperage current.So by my estimate your looking at 5volts DC at 3 amperes (a standard household socket is 2 amperes).
To actually use these lights with anything but what they were intended is impractical because of the extreme danger of using high amperage current where a short circuit is allowed,plus you'd still have to use the often massive original power supply of the lights to power even one of them.
Hope I helped,
ryan0.
