Got my lights up!
All the details are in the comments of the video. Leave a comment (here or there) if you want more info.
Enjoy!
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It’s been a busy few weeks of sitting on the couch. I’ve been working on the light sequences for the Christmas show. Even for a 3 minute song, the sequence takes about a week of evenings to get right. There’s only so many ways you can make the lights dance, and trying to make it look different for all 4 songs has been a bit of a challenge for me. So the sequences are done, and I’ve got most of the displays built. I just need to build a ladder to string lights on for the garage pillars. It’s a brick house and I’m not sure how else to string the lights on the garage, so I’m building a frame to nail the lights to, then I’ll just tack it all to the bricks. Other than that, I’ve been playing a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops (or codBlops as it’s more affectionately known) and having a lot of fun with it. My k/d is getting to the positive side but I still have a few bad rounds where I’m hitting an embarrassing 0.33 But, that’s offset by some big games. Best k/d has been 4.6 lol I totally kicked ass on that one As bored as I am, I signed up for Netflix.ca yesterday from the PS3… I wanted to browse the titles first, but couldn’t… and was too lazy to get off the couch to walk into the office 20 feet away and grab the laptop. But they had a month free, so figured I had nothing to lose. Well, I should have checked the list first… complete waste of time. Netflix.ca has hardly any new movies, hardly any tv shows… That’s why I wanted it really… for the tv shows I’ve missed… Fringe, Buffy, Lost, Dr. Who, House, Bones, Big Bang Theory, Futurama and pretty much every movie I wanted to see are “not available”. They are listed and available in the states, but not in Canada. It’s more like the More Movies channel , or Turner Classic movies channel… total shit. Sure, I’m going to use up my free month watching The Thing, and the stack of B rate horror movies they have (and they do have a lot of B and C movies) but it’s no where near worth it for me to pay $8/month for movies I’m only watching because there’s nothing better on. That’s the whole point of Netflix (for me anyway)… watch what I want when I want… not watch crap when I want… that’s what my basic cable is for I’ve been working on my Christmas display already. It’s going to be pretty lame I think, but it’s still a lot of work. I’m just getting into the automated lights/computer controlled thing, and it’s been a bit of work to get started. I started about this time last year, ordering circuit boards, electronic parts, and getting educated about what effects I can do. I ended up going with an open source software package called VixenLights. It allows you to sync music with blinky-flashy lights, there’s a lot of devices it can drive, and I went with a really simple parallel port controller called the Grinch. The Grinch just does on/off for 64 channels, no dimming… and it runs off of a parallel port… tough to find those on computers these days. Lucky for me, and rather ironically, all my computers are old junkers so I was good to go. Once I got the Grinch working, I decided to add in the dimming by building up a Renard Converter (Ren-c). It runs off of a serial port, but it’s a bit more complex as it involved PIC micro-controllers and some programming… I’ve done a bunch of PIC programming in the past, so I had a programmer, and new what I was getting into. So, with the setup I have this year, I’ll be maxing out at 64 separate channels of blinky-flashy; Pretty lame by the standards some displays are running at. I’ve just completed the 10 Mid-sized trees I was working on, each one is a 4′ tomato cage, wrapped in chicken wire, with 100 white and 100 multi coloured LEDs on separate channels. (at $20/string, that’s a fair bit of cash. Hence my display will be lame… too much $$ for year one) Anyhoo, I’ve got my 10 Mids and I’ll be starting on the Minis soon. They will be the same chicken wire wrapped tomato cages, but half the size. 20 of them, each with 50 red and 50 green on separate channels. Should be able to do some nice effects with them. I’ve also got about 10 strings of 100 multis for the house, and some icicle lights to round out the year. All in, it’s going to be about 5500 lights (all LED except for the icicles) and only using about 1200 watts…. 10Amps max. Since the power cost here is about $0.10/Kilowatt hour, it’s only going to cost me a bit over 10 cents / hour if I had all the lights on at one time… not too bad. But, I’ll be maxing out the 64 channels, so I will prolly only have 16 or 18 minis. Depends on how I set up the house. (Since each Mid/Mini is 2 channels, and I’ll have 30 total trees, that’s 60 of my 64 channels… I’m thinking I’ll need 8 channels for the house… so I have some decisions to make Below is a short vid of the hardware and my Mids… and some links to where more information is (click on the title of the video below to open it up in a new window, you’ll see the links in the comments on youtube.) We’re taking a trip out to the west coast in a few weeks and unfortunately Maggie is not carry on. So we’ve been looking for a good place to board her. A couple of the neighbours have offered to look after her, and it’s very much appreciated. (Awesome neighbours here) but Maggie’s a spoiled brat and requires a lot of attention. And since she’s a big dog, she’s quite a handful. Our two options remaining for the dog is a dog sitter, or take her to a kennel. Dog sitters are expensive… $45/day for 3 x 1/2 hour visits… not enough time for the dog I think. And I don’t want her in a kennel where she’s in a box all day long. She still sleeps in her kennel at night here and likes it just fine, but I’d rather her be able to roam during the day. We found the perfect spot for Maggie… Harry and Rupert’s Hotel for Dogs We went out there sunday for a visit, and Maggie got to play with a dozen or so dogs, running around a large fenced in area. The dog run is over an acre for sure, and the sleeping quarters is a converted barn. Maggie will get an old horse stall all to herself. Rather a converted horse stall, it’s got a floor, bed, and her own food/water bowls. And it’s cheaper than expected… $40/day. That and there’s someone around 24 hours/day makes it a done deal. It’s been a while since Maggie got to run around with a bunch of dogs off leash, and she did great! She was scared quite a bit at first, but soon managed to relax enough to play with another pup a bit. She was still quite excited/nervous as she was slobbery! Foot long string of drool pretty much the whole time there, and refused water even though it was really hot out. Never seen her do that before… I’m sure the anxiety will drop within a few hours of her being there and it would have been nice to spend a bit more time there to see, but it’s a busy place and our visit time was up. So, dog’s taken care of for our trip, so that turns my attention back to the house and our soon to be arriving visitors… I decided that I should put a quick fix on the downstairs bathroom… it’s needs an overhaul, and might as well get it done before company arrives. I would have liked to redo the shower, but there’s a line that you have to draw somewhere with these old houses as we are not doing a full gut on it. I’ve got the drywall up, now it’s mud/tape time. Once I’ve got the primer on the walls, I’ll get on the flooring… Here’s a few shots of the bathroom in progress, and a few shots of nap time.
I bought a new oscilloscope off of eBay the other day. I’ve always had good luck with eBay and this purchase was no different. I ended up with a Tektronix 2246A; It’s a 100MHz analog scope from the late 80s. My last scope was an old 2 channel 20MHz scope made by Brunnel Instruments. Not sure when . . . → Read More: New Oscilloscope I got another shipment of electronic components from Digikey.ca the other day. Their ordering interface is crap. I spent many frustrating hours setting up order lists only to be confronted with the inability to combine them. Searching for parts is difficult, and all in all just a bad experience. But, they have a deal with Canada . . . → Read More: More Parts Opened up the laptop this evening and that’s what I was greeted with. No boot device… nice. A reboot, and all appears well, but that’s not what I want with a new lappy. Hope it was an isolated incident and will not be happening again. Being that it’s the end of June, it’s time for me to . . . → Read More: No boot device… I got fired up about doing some more work on the basement, so I thought I would start on the bar area. We are trying to save a bit of cash, so we’re going to reuse the existing bar, and paint out the bead-board, or wainscoting, or whatever it’s called. I really don’t want to be . . . → Read More: More renos I just hate their keyboards… It’s . . . → Read More: I don’t hate the French The struggle of life and death is on display in my back yard… As I’m strolling in my back yard having a smoke, I hear a rustle at my feet and I glance down to see a snake (hopefully of the relatively harmless ‘garden’ variety lol) having a toad/frog for lunch. I’m pretty sure I stepped on . . . → Read More: The reclusive Toad-snake spotted! |
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Copyright © 2012 Kuz I said so - All Rights Reserved |
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I still am working through the single player game on Veteran… I’m a trophy whore, and need to get them all. I won’t get the platinum one as a few trophies are zombie related, and I just can’t get into that gameplay.
