The solar garden lights aren’t working out too well. The batteries are old and weren’t very good to begin with, and they’re not holding much of a charge. Replacing them would cost somewhere in the $700-$800 range, which is more than I want to spend on this project, so I’m thinking over alternatives. One such might be to refit all the lights to use CR123s instead of AAs. These cost about $1 apiece in bulk, and I would only need one per unit since lithium batteries provide 3.2V. I’d have to do a fair bit of soldering, though.

If I just can’t make the garden lights work, I could always glue an LED to the end of each branch, run some cheap 20-gauge wire down each branch to the root, and power everything off a deep-cycle battery (like the one I used for the Rave-o-Matic). This would take just as much soldering as the battery-refit, and there’d be a lot of finicky gluing and fitting, and a lot of not-so-finicky wire-wrapping, and the physics of the branch movement would be all different, but it might look good.