[skypanther]

I'm sure this is a completely dumb idea. But I want wireless Christmas lights. Individual little clip-on LEDs powered by ambient RF like wifi background, the ambient field from a home's wiring, or an "antenna" that you snake up the trunk of the tree to emit a field. Then you just clip on the lights where you want them. I'm not knowledgeable enough in electronics to know if this is even possible.

[Workaccount2]

It's possible, but in the worst way.

The idea you have in your head, is not possible. A single LED (like one tiny bulb, not a string) hanging on your evergreen shrub is going to consume about 1000x more energy than what could be expected to be available floating around the local airwaves. So - impossible.

But of course you could just increase the energy in the airwaves by 1000x, give the middle finger to the FCC, and risk having to take out a loan to cover your energy bill.

Or you could go for inductive coupling, which actually would be viable and has been demonstrated as "wireless energy" ad-nauseam for the last 120 years. You would just have to deal with extremely finicky LED alignment to get power from the very difficult to engineer and extremely power inefficient source coil which will bathe your front yard in a rapidly oscillating magnetic field. Again pissing off the FCC and super charging your energy usage.

Or you can just plug in your lights.

[ouryummydino]

In an outdoor context one could also harvest another abundant energy source. I think this is actually sort of interesting. A swarm of individual lights could each be pulsed randomly at a very low duty cycle and the effect might still be usable.

[skypanther]

Sadly, I expected that to be the answer. Oh well, I can dream! Thanks for your helpful follow-up.

[justsomehnguy]

You can do that with microwave oven. It would need some adjustments..

[moffkalast]

Tesla coil trunk, fluorescent bulbs as lights? Could work, might kill you somewhere along the line.

[JocPelletier]

Yes look at onio.com they developed a frequency energy harvesting microcontroller

[kevindamm]

The other solutions are right in that you'd need some high power transmission to be practical

but

if you harness solar power during the day and use battery power at night, you could drive some, but not many, bulbs. More photovoltaics and parallel batteries would be needed to scale. But, it would be able to amplify the RF signal and effectively drive the bulbs by radio. I would recommend driving a near-field radio and not off of WiFi if you're going for any aesthetic effect. You could even drive it with the ambient audio (there are some integrated devices already like this, but wired).

[aydyn]

There are solar powered christmas lights. That seems more much more practical.

[wegfawefgawefg]

It would be cool to just have one off LEDs like this to stick around. If they ever light up, get scared!